Top 100 Quotes About Mortality
#1. Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. - LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003
Ray Kurzweil
#2. As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.
Anne Rice
#3. Let mortal man keep to his own
Mortality, and not expect too much.
Euripides
#4. We think of mortality so little these days ...
I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.
Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I:
As I am so will you be ...
Tana French
#5. I think when you see an aircraft fire, these angry, black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you that you - you - you understand the seriousness of the mission. And you understand your own mortality.
George H. W. Bush
#6. God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.
Jacques Rigaut
#7. Human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn't matter how long a machine lasts, but they cannot tolerate an immortal human being since their own mortality is endurable only so long as it is universal.
Isaac Asimov
#10. The world shall retire from me before I shall retire from the world. John Quincy Adams
Paul C. Nagel
#11. I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
Gary Shteyngart
#12. Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with.
David Gilmour
#13. Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
Anna Quindlen
#14. Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow claspest the limits of mortality.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#15. Studies continue to provide evidence that more than any other food, fruit is associated with lowered mortality from all cancers combined.
Joel Fuhrman
#16. We are in the school [or mortality] and keep learning and we do not expect to cease learning while we live on earth; and when we pass through the veil, we expect still to continue to learn and increase our fund of information.
David A. Bednar
#17. Focusing on the Lord and everlasting life can help us not only at Christmas, but through all the challenges of mortality.
Russell M. Nelson
#18. My dad was an agent for Met Life. In the '50s, I remember the mortality rate was something like - you had - 58 was the average age. Then it was moved up to 62, and then 65, 68.
Willard Scott
#19. Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality.
Francesco Petrarca
#20. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#21. Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.
P. J. O'Rourke
#22. He was in his secret room in the heart now. Having entered he could be bold. A man hasn't to be on his best behavior in Heaven; he can kick the furniture around. He can stoop down and picks up lumps of mortality without being born again to die.
Patrick Kavanagh
#23. But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.
George Pattison
#24. ... part of the grief was that each member of the family was mourning his own mortality.
Alan Lightman
#25. The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
Annie Dillard
#26. Life is only precious because it ends, kid.
Rick Riordan
#27. Let me fall in love one last time, I beg them. Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present.
Jack Gilbert
#29. A broken heart is a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bills of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases, namely, that no physicians can cure it.
Henry Fielding
#30. Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.
Steve Erickson
#31. Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.
Anatole France
#32. God knows the angel's wings must have been over us in view of the terrible mortality in all other camps up an down this line which seemed to be being built in bones.
Edward Dunlop
#33. I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.
Matthew Woodring Stover
#34. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
#36. And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.
Stephen King
#37. I believe that every human soul is teaching something to someone nearly every minute here in mortality.
M. Russell Ballard
#38. I could not turn away from anyone
Like you, a stranger, or refuse to help him.
I know well, being mortal, that my claim
Upon the future is no more than yours.
Sophocles
#39. He wore his age like a statement that fighting the ravages of time and mortality was beneath his notice.
James S.A. Corey
#40. Penetrating the walls and rising to the stars, the music continued, the slow movement of the Eroica Symphony, crying out against pain, crying out against the injustice of man's mortality.
Jose Saramago
#41. The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.
Raquel Cepeda
#42. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.
Studs Terkel
#43. The changing year's successive plan Proclaims mortality to man.
Horace
#44. If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?
Paul Kalanithi
#45. ...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
Gore Vidal
#46. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
C.S. Lewis
#47. Just think! Garden, garden, garden, garden, garden, two happy people, and it could have gone on forever! They knew, they'd been told, but they ate it anyway, and from there on out, 'family!' Shame, fear, jobs, mortality, envy, murder ... "
"Well," William said brightly, "and sex.
Deborah Eisenberg
#48. Many years have passed since I first discovered you. You troubled me then. You trouble me now. But mortality, like thunder, rumbles its dull way toward me. It is I who must take the step. Through the fire. And come unto you.
Caryl Phillips
#49. Don't fear your mortality, because it is this very mortality that gives meaning and depth and poignancy to all the days that will be granted to you.
Paul Tsongas
#50. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how
many of my old acquaintance are dead!
William Shakespeare
#51. Tribulations often enrich, refine, and guide us to a deeper understanding of the purpose of our existence here in mortality and of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
Jose A. Teixeira
#52. I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.
Michael Eric Dyson
#53. I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#54. Americans in 1763 lived always in the shadow and presence of death. Death was not yet romanticized as it would be in the 19th century, nor yet sanitized as it would be in the 20th century.
Colin G. Calloway
#55. Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears [ ... ]
Edgar Allan Poe
#56. I personally don't like depressing subjects, people say, as if mortality is a lifestyle choice, disease and violence and sorrow a matter of taste.
Sarah Moss
#57. My spirit is too weak
mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
John Keats
#58. Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.
Caitlin Doughty
#59. In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth,
And all you behold, though it appears without,
It is within, in your imagination,
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.
William Blake
#60. He could smell her mortality, the sweet rot of corruption.
Cassandra Clare
#61. Can't be any harder than sitting here and having a staring contest with mortality.
Brandon Sanderson
#62. All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its ... motivation. Thus vampires spend a lot of time lounging around and staring out of the window and finding they can't be arsed.
Glen Duncan
#63. The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.
Ally Condie
#64. Plague did not honor social class, and mortality among the nobility approximated that of the general population.
Robert Steven Gottfried
#65. The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
Harold Bloom
#66. First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette's chew toy alone - )
Jess Walter
#67. All this natural misery," Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. "Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?
Dan Simmons
#68. Sister, look ye, How, by a new creation of my tailor's I've shook off old mortality.
John Ford
#69. Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.
Columba Stewart
#70. 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.
Keith Buckley
#72. He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time.
Rupert Thomson
#73. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
C.S. Lewis
#74. All the works of mortal man have been doomed to mortality, and in the midst of things which have been destined to die, we live!
Seneca.
#75. Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
Irvin D. Yalom
#76. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it. Patients
Atul Gawande
#78. He'd given up his mortality, his soul, for this moment, this second chance, and if she fell in love with him again, he needed to know it was real.
Lisa Kessler
#79. Mortality is but a stepping-stone to a more glorious existence in the future.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#80. Institutions and cultures are not immortal. Humans, Christian and non-Christian, are. Compared to us, our country is a gnat.
Matt Chandler
#81. I'm a leukemia survivor, and I recall during my darkest days in the hospital when my friends would come to see me, especially the male friends - they had certain mortality issues with their visit.
Lew Temple
#82. The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.
Sherry Turkle
#83. I've always been a sad person. I'm a happy person too, but it's a thing in my brain or my spirit or something, I'm just sad and really acutely aware of mortality and loss.
Fernando Torres
#84. I am now faced with mortality. Definitely not the most generous move.
Lance Loud
#85. Nothing is more inspiring in today's world of easily dissolved marriages than to observe a husband and wife quietly appreciating and enjoying each other's friendship year in and year out as they experience together the blessings and trials of mortality.
Marlin K. Jensen
#86. We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.
Tana French
#87. Since the beginning, a woman's first and most important role has been ushering into mortality spirit sons and daughters of our Father in Heaven.
Ezra Taft Benson
#88. I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric product
And look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.
Walt Whitman
#89. The unconscious is so seductive because mortality is alien to it
Dean Cavanagh
#90. The reason some men fear older women is they fear their own mortality.
Frances Lear
#91. Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.
Ali Smith
#92. Religion does not belong to God; it belongs to the human reaction against mortality!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#93. There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.
Gretel Ehrlich
#95. If you have had no tension in your life, never been screwed up by problems, your mortality well within your own grasp, and someone tells you that God so loved you that He gave His Son to die for you, nothing but good manners will keep you from being amused.
Oswald Chambers
#96. The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding.
James Alison
#97. Hence, in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
William Wordsworth
#98. I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.
George Gordon Byron
#99. Mortal minds are always unsettled by eternal things; they want to catch the infinite and nail it down to something finite. Impossible!
Seth Adam Smith
#100. I have often thought that my work with wildlife taught me the meaning of patience, and my work with the big trees taught me the meaning of humility, and my work with the ice has taught me the meaning of mortality.
James Balog
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