Mortality Quotes

But there was little heart to our lust,only the confusion of not knowinghow long we'd have in our bodies.

~ Joseph Bathanti

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

~ William Shakespeare

You have to give up! you have to give up!You have to realize that someday you will die,Until you know that, you are useless!

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Aging is a mortal term that my immortal spirit doesn't quite grasp.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I must indeed abide the Doom of Men whether I will or nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Numenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.

~ Milan Kundera

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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?

~ Patti Smith

Every leaf before it falls must think itself immortal.

~ Marty Rubin

We were too greedy, grasping for immortality too soon. Perhaps if we had only been patient, content to wait, we would all have forever in the end.

~ Jessica Khoury

I am not a Buddhist. Yet there is a Buddhist story that I hold dear. A monk walks in a forest, and chances upon a tiger. The tiger chases him, and the monk runs until he comes to a cliff. With the tiger on his heels, the man grasps a vine and clambers down. Another tiger appears at the bottom. As the man hangs there, a mouse crawls from a crevice just beyond his reach and begins to gnaw the vine. Death above, death below, and death in between. He sees a big ripe strawberry near his mouth. It is delicious.In this moment, flying miles above the strawberry fields of California's San Joachin Valley, I think that I would change the ending of this story. Instead of giving the doomed man a strawberry, what if we leave him alone with the two tigers, the mouse, and the fraying vine? For the last time, his arms grow tired, he feels a familiar ache deep in his muscles. For the last time he catches his breath, feels a rasping in his throat and lungs. He feels this, and a thousand other things. It is all delicious.

~ Derrick Jensen

I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia

~ Ptolemy

Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.

~ Ptolemy

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

~ John Taliaferro

A heroic, losing battle! I'm tired of brave men who die. There's nothing pretty about losing.

~ Warren Eyster

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

~ Bruce R. Mcconkie

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

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.

~ Daniel Alarcón

Krishna was once asked what was the most miraculous thing in all creation, and he replied, That a man should wake each morning and believe deep in his heart that he will live forever, even though he knows that he is doomed.

~ Christopher Pike

Fear and hopelessness washed over her. She was looking her own mortality in the face, and it was a horrifying thing to do.

~ Rose Wynters

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

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

~ Atul Gawande

I am in a profession that has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it’s not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering.

~ Atul Gawande

I love the quaint saying of a dying man, who exclaimed, I have no fear of going home; I have sent all before me; God's finger is on the latch of my door, and I am ready for Him to enter.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

~ Victor Hugo

What's a man worth without love ? $.89 worth of chemicals. Hawkeye Pierce

~ M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team

Let this change you. Let this take hold in the very center of your soul. Write it on the walls of your heart. Let this emanate through every part of you, and trickle into every aspect of your life. You were not designed to be merely a good person, but that through the experience of mortality you could embrace the divinity you were created with. I do not merely want you to get along with others, but for everyone to be one, and one in me. Not for my glory, but that the glory of godliness will exalt you to a higher plane of existence, beyond anything you've ever imagined. Throw out weakness and fear; rid yourself of those spoiled garments. Adorn yourself with new garments, spotless and pure. Be reborn. Set your hand to the plow and look not back. Take that first step onto the water; do not fear the wind or the waves, for it is I your Lord and Savior who beckon you. Listen o listen to my voice, which is the voice of the Good Sheppard who calls you; for why should ye parish for naught?’ Parker, the bar has been set, for you and for I, and all the rest of humanity should we chose to accept the invitation,” Flavius concluded powerfully.

~ Michael Brent Jones

The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

~ Jonathan Franzen

...A mirror can trick you day by day into thinking you remain looking and existing in one way forever. But a photograph presents you with the truth: it freezes you eternally, existing as a reminder that you can never, ever go back to any one moment again- that you are always changing, hour by hour, cell by cell, in tiny fragments that build skyscrapers overnight.

~ Kels Adeline Sapp

Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.

~ Georg Simmel

There are a few things I've learned over the years. One is that time doesn't stop for anyone; hurdling forward and onward, unstoppable and catastrophic.

~ Shawn Michael Severud

As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.

~ Andrew R. George

We have hands, we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The world shall retire from me before I shall retire from the world. John Quincy Adams

~ Paul C. Nagel

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.

~ Clive James

None of us are getting out of here alive.

~ R. Alan Woods

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.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

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.

~ Ambrose Bierce