Mortality Quotes

I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.

~ Joseph Conrad

He wasn't supposed to die,' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I.

~ Patti Smith

Strangest problems of life seem clearing, but clouds sweep between--Is my journey’s end coming?

~ Herman Melville

Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore, should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained; and in him that escapes, it were no sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive the day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.

~ William Shakespeare

That which is alive hath known death, and that which is dead can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.

~ H. Rider Haggard

Many a survivor of a plane crash who is or was against cannibalism and had never eaten human flesh once found themselves in a situation where they had to either eat human flesh, or go the way of all flesh.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age, it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most sane human beings who have managed to attain and retain fame each uses it to dramatically increase their name’s chances of being remembered until Jesus comes back, since their heart cannot do what they consciously or unconsciously lust for, that is to say, for it to beat until Jesus returns.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most of us cling to life as if our existence were a result of our deed or choice.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We envy people who are extremely old because we wish to live that long, not because we want to be that old.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The real reason the number of things that are shared via social media every single minute is so astronomical is because, whenever they each do, most users do not share or say something because they believe they have something worth remembering; they do mainly or only because they fear being forgotten.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

~ David Levithan

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

~ Carl Sagan

For thousands of years priests, rabbis and muftis explained that humans cannot overcome famine, plague and war by their own efforts. Then along came the bankers, investors and industrialists, and within 200 years managed to do exactly that.

~ Yuval Noah Harari

Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each hath stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole—vain fools! for what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by mind of man. Thou, then, since thou hast fallen to this place, shalt know no more than human wisdom may attain.

~ Empedocles

Dear Miss Pomeroy, I am saddened by the things I do not know. There are hundreds--thousands--of books in the world and I will never be able to read all of them.I am old.Walter

~ Barbara Wersba

Positive energy radiates from every word you share to a magnitude that can not be measured on scale. The vibrations he sends your way are received and absorbed into the very core of your existence. The power within his words quench the areas of your spirit that only God knows. Mortality thrives on the very essence of Godly Love

~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

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.

~ John Brunner

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

~ Umberto Eco

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its stud

~ Hector Berlioz

Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.

~ Margaret George

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.

~ Denis Diderot

The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.

~ William T. Vollmann

When men shake hands with time, time crushesThem like tumblers; little pieces of glass.

~ Abu Al-Ala Al-Ma'arri

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

~ Hippocrates

Humans recognize the duality, autonomy, and latitude range of the mind and the body, and all humans comprehend their impending mortality. Unlike other animals, humankind knows despair brought about by understanding the inevitability of death of all living creatures. The radius of human thought touching upon the longitude of our transient existence causes infinite pain. Seeking to ameliorate existential anguish incites us to ponder spiritual matters, and this sphere of mental activity spurs us to contemplate the perimeter of unknown frontiers. Our ability to understand the compass of life and death allows us to view the circumference of the world as consisting of a past, a present, and a future in relation to our own lives. How a person views the range of their earthly life and how a person rationalizes their march towards a deathly outback creates a system of beliefs that separate people into classes, and the variations amongst class members’ belief systems supplements who we think we are.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

~ Herman Melville

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.

~ Herman Melville

If you can't sublimate your fear of mortality into sex with your best friend, what's it there for?

~ Justin Taylor

She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.

~ Rupert Thomson

The origin behind myths and religion is human terror of annihilation. Human societies invented mythology and religion in order to militate against people’s fear of living a mortal life. People fear time as a destroyer of human happiness, human beings, and human societies.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere between Mrs.Wheeler's class and Mondawmin Mall, somewhere between the schools and the streets. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafés seeing young poets flip though 'The Waste Land,' or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, had not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing—ever instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth!

~ Mary Charlton

Oh you, my generation!- we were a lovely lot! Sharp minds- arguing all the time and brittle bodies and even more brittle laughter- and all the time knowing that we were growing up to die.

~ Joan Wehlen Morrison

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

~ E.r. Eddison

May you find what you are looking for and realize it is not the answer.

~ Ahmed Mostafa