Mortality Quotes - Page 4

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

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

None of us are getting out of here alive".

R. Alan Woods

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

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

Paul C. Nagel

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

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

Andrew R. George

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

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

...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

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

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. tYou 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. tThrow 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?’tParker, 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

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

M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team

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

Victor Hugo

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

Bangambiki Habyarimana

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

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

Warren Eyster

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

John Taliaferro

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

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

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

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

Death is every mortal’s life to be alive!

Munia Khan

Every leaf before it falls must think itself immortal.

Marty Rubin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richelle E. Goodrich

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Joseph Bathanti

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

Madeleine L'Engle

In the depths of his soul Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying... he simply did not, he could not possibly understand it. The example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal-- had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but by no means himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other human beings...And Caius is indeed mortal, and it's right that he die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts-- for me it's another matter. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible.So it felt to him.

Leo Tolstoy

Surely, if there could be regrets in heaven, the saints might mourn that they did not live longer here to do more good.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Institutions and cultures are not immortal. Humans, Christian and non-Christian, are. Compared to us, our country is a gnat.

Matt Chandler

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.

Georges F. Doriot

Yes, it will all end one day; but today is worth living.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.

Stephen King

As she rounded a corner one of her favourite songs came on the radio, and sunlight filtered through the trees the way it does with lace curtains, reminding her of her grandmother, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. Not for her grandmother, who was then still very much among the living, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterwards she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn’t being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.

Steven Galloway

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal.

Richard E. Leakey

The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, on day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.

Susannah Cahalan

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

Paul Kalanithi

The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we’re likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we’re forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.

Sheena Iyengar

It is odd that the Bible says, ‘God created man,’ whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, ‘The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,’ whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory.

Béla Bartók

All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.

Glen Duncan

We humans desperately seek stability in hopes, I think, that we can control our lives, though that isn't the way things work. Everything is in flux; we are dynamic beings born with expiration dates into an uncertain Universe.

Larry J. Dunlap

I keep saying there's no Choice, and what I've meant is that you can't choose: you have no right or ability to select one of the two alternatives. But I didn't go far enough. There's no Choice because the Choice itself is wrong. It's a false dilemma. The alternatives are not alternatives at all. Long versus short, quiet versus heroic: they're the same. In the scope of infinity, in a universe with no edge, human history is a flare and human consciousness is a blink. All lives are short and all lives are quiet.But all lives are glorious too, Cal. To live! To live like a human! You are ordinary and extraordinary all at once. You have a heart that contracts and relaxes and beats out your moments. You are alive and you know you are alive. Your too-short time is long e

Kate Hattemer

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.

Wallace Stevens

✡ Before aligning the body to the future, the mind has to straighten out from the impairment of religion.

David L. Lloyd

Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late.

Philip Roth

Darker and darker, he said; farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young - and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave the closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End.

Wilkie Collins

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Mortality Quotes - Page 4

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