Mortality Quotes | Quotes about Mortality

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Mortality Quote #1

A Cathedral Façade at Midnight

Along the sculptures of the western wall
I watched the moonlight creeping:
It moved as if it hardly moved at all
Inch by inch thinly peeping
Round on the pious figures of freestone, brought
And poised there when the Universe was wrought
To serve its centre, Earth, in mankind’s thought.

The lunar look skimmed scantly toe, breast, arm,
Then edged on slowly, slightly,
To shoulder, hand, face; till each austere form
Was blanched its whole length brightly
Of prophet, king, queen, cardinal in state,
That dead men’s tools had striven to simulate;
And the stiff images stood irradiate.

A frail moan from the martyred saints there set
Mid others of the erection
Against the breeze, seemed sighings of regret
At the ancient faith’s rejection
Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress
Of Reason’s movement, making meaningless.
Thomas Hardy

Mortality Quote #2

? Before aligning the body to the future, the mind has to straighten out from the impairment of religion.
David L. Lloyd
Mortality Quote #3

[A] right understanding that death is nothing
to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it
an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for
immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has
truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.
Epicurus
Mortality Quote #4

[T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.
Sonia Sotomayor
Mortality Quote #5

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...
Bertrand Russell
Mortality Quote #6

A heroic, losing battle! I'm tired of brave men who die. There's nothing pretty about losing.
Warren Eyster
Mortality Quote #7

A life is not a waste of time
Nalini Singh
Mortality Quote #8

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
Mortality Quote #9

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
Mortality Quote #10

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
Mortality Quote #11

Accepting one's age and mortality is a sign that you've now become an adult. Once you realize you no longer fit in the same jeans you did when you were 30, and the spicy foods you loved when you were younger now like to revisit you at 2 AM, you come to realize that with aging comes adjustment. And, aging isn't a bad thing - it sure beats the alternative!
James Arlen Dennis
Mortality Quote #12

Age is a seasoned trickster. To our parents, we will always be children. Within ourselves, the same yearnings of youth; the same aspirations of adolescence, will last a lifetime. Only to the young - blinded by our grey hair and slowing gait - do we appear old and increasingly beyond the pale.
Alex Morritt
Mortality Quote #13

Aging is a mortal term that my immortal spirit doesn't quite grasp.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Mortality Quote #14

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
Mortality Quote #15

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
Mortality Quote #16

All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.
Glen Duncan
Mortality Quote #17

All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.
Anne Rice
Mortality Quote #18

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.
Audrey Auden
Mortality Quote #19

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
Mortality Quote #20

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-Baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlett, still
Clasped empty in the other, and
One sees with a sharp tender shock
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long,
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see,
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes being
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came

Washing at their identity.
Now helpless in the hollow
Of an unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains.

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost-true:
What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
Mortality Quote #21

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
Mortality Quote #22

And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.
K.W. Jeter
Mortality Quote #23

And in a way, this was how he had come to see his death, as a series of small ones taking place over the course of his life and leading finally to the main event, which would be so anti-climatic, so undramatic (a sudden violent seizure in his long abused heart, a quick massive flooding of the brain) it would go unnoticed. It was the small deaths occurring over an entire lifetime that took the greater toll.
Paule Marshall
Mortality Quote #24

And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.
H. Rider Haggard
Mortality Quote #25

And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.
Stephen King
Mortality Quote #26

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.
Haruki Murakami
Mortality Quote #27

And we went through AIDS... which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.
Stephen Greco
Mortality Quote #28

As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.
Andrew George
Mortality Quote #29

as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.
Angela Carter
Mortality Quote #30

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

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