Quotes About Mortality

My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.

Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

moments one knows only death will obliterate.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.

There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

Time is the flesh and blood of death; death is not a skull, a skeleton, but a clock face, a sun hurtling through a sea of thin gas. A part of you has died since you began to read this sentence.

Swithin! And the fellow had gone and died, last November, at the age of seventy-nine, renewing the doubt whether Forsytes could live for ever, which had first arisen when Aunt Ann passed away.

Yes,' muttered Jon, 'life's beastly short. One wants to life forever and know everything.' 'And love everybody?' 'No,' cried Jon; 'I only want to love once - you.

Try to leave one alive… … but do not try too hard. (The Life-Taker)

For people in thrall to 'mortality', the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonizing about alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must.

if you don't think about death, you don't appreciate life.

He lived forty-four years and no one cried at his funeral.

Live while you live, then die and be done with.

Mary Tudor, the English queen, fell mortally ill at the age of forty-two.

She was only twenty-eight. It was, wrote a chronicler

And now that I think back, I realize the real gap between us lay in the fact that I, who was so proud of coming from the swift-winged world of science, was laughing at an old world where it was possible seriously to believe that men die young of the bad habit of failing to go out on a dangerous river to gaze at the earth when it turns overnight into silver.

I wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything? And by the time I faced my own mortality at the Bookmill in western Massachusetts, how much less would I have done? Her leaving taught me about the worst sadness, one we all must face eventually. I feel lucky I am better equipped to help others who are going through it now.

But even though we were all horrifying reminders of our own mortality, it was nice to see my old, crumbling friends.

You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.

What is this fascination the world has with death?