Quotes About Mortality

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

In books I meet the dead as if they were alive in books I see what is yet to come... All things decay and pass in time... All fame would fall into oblivion if God had not given mortal men the book to aid them

Now I am dead and laid in my grave And that my bones are rotten, By this shall I remembered be, Or else I am forgotten.

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

In the Spirit Building there are thousands upon thousands of jars containing fish or snake, octopus or lobster, pickled to the life. ... As you slide the doors back upon this pallid parade of containers and bottles your voice automatically loses decibels. You reflect: mortality, this is your sad face; you defy decay only as a ghastly pickle.

The big idea is that what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society.

A life takes as long as it takes to bring us to our truth, even if we only make it to our death bed.

The tragedy is to die without knowing who you were, to keep the act going till the end.

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! …5

A coward dies many times. A brave man never tastes of death but once.

What long-dead face makes here the grass so green? On what earth-buried bosom do we lean? Ah! love, when we in turn are grass and flowers, By what kind eyes to come shall we be seen?

Now when I die, I shall only be dead.

Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn't drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder

Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. ("Death Ship")

Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else. (from The Conqueror)

Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else.

With words I have knit my shroud and will bury myself therein

What makes my life my own is ultimately the sheer fact that it is mine to live, mine to make something of, in the face of my possible non-existence. Every other possibility is something that I may be free not to do, and that someone else may be able to do just as well as I can. But my death is a possibility that necessarily faces me alone: no one can face it for me.

Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.

Here's the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It's a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It's the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.

For there is hope of a tree, if it goes down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender branches will not cease. Though the root grows old in the earth, and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs. But man, man wastes away and dies and gives up the ghost, and where is he?

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.