Mortality Quotes

All flesh shall perish together and man shall turn again unto dust.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

I knew the end would come, one day. I knew my life deserved to be over. Yet, even knowing that, I was no less fearful.

My son will wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.

It’s quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education.

Creating is the closest thing to being immortal.

It's a harrowing experience to see death approaching in haste towards you, what is hell but confronting your own mortality

A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Golden lads and girls all must, like chimmney-sweepers, come to dust.

In whatever disease sleep is laborious, it is a deadly symptom; but if sleep does good, it is not deadly.

Let it all go, one foot in the grave and one bag packed. We shall go to our end in the warm glow of the past, burning up the memories, all the clutter given back.

They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life's value.

Because we have only one (life) we go about blundering along him nervous haste.

Your real name is a mortal name. Now you need one that is immortal, the one that takes the high stage and plays above the rest. You can't be immortal and mortal at the same time.

In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.

I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.

Legacy is not what's left tomorrow when you're gone. It's what you give, create, impact and contribute today while you're here that then happens to live on.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

Your death rides a fast camel.

The idyll ended, as idylls must.

If you don't make peace with your own mortality, you'll never know what it's like to truly be alive.

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.

Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling.

Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay.

Pale death kicks with impartial foot at the hovels of the poor and the towers of kings.

Do you believe that you will die? Yes man is mortal I am a man ergo... no that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I am asking is, have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind but with your body? Actually felt that one the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be icy and yellow? No, of course you don't believe it. Which is the reason why up until now you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement.

Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spinThe Thread of present Life away to win-What? for ourselves, who know not if we shallBreathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

Death is never an ending, death is a change;Death is beautiful, for death is strange;Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow.Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. I'm surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,

Your faces are very beautiful,but they are wooden cages.You had better run from me.My words are fire.

I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric productAnd look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.

Each October I walk into the woodslooking for bones: rabbit skulls,a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deerwith the blood bleached out. What diedin the lush of roses and mintshines out from the tangle of twigsthat bind it to the placeof its last leaping. The living lackthat kind of clarity. In late April,when the water spreads out and outtill everything is lilies and seepage,there is only the mystery of tracks,a rustle receding in the many reeds.And so the bones accumulateacross my windowsill: the flightlesswings and exaggerated grins,the silent unmoving remindersof where the glories of April lead.

Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.

You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.

The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.

Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.

It isn't about being fair and equal. It's about the difference between right and wrong." He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. "And this was wrong.

At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.

Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.

With regard to things such as independence, mental capabilities, and sexuality, a very old man is nothing but a gigantic infant with white hair and wrinkles.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

Resignation is what kills people. Once they've rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.

They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.

Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told.It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

You will always be special to someone. Unless you grow so old, everyone you knew went ahead

As Adam brought death, so Christ brought life; as Adam is the father of mortality, so Christ is the father of immortality.

There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.

Without time, you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity....Time is what gives life significance.

All who live possess eternal life, and few would trade it for an immortal body, if they truly understood what it is to be alive.

The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.