Quotes about Mortality

How short is human life! the very breath Which frames my words accelerates my death.

We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life and advances us a step toward the grave; our whole life is only along and painful sickness.

It is the very joy of this earthly life to think that it will come to an end.

Already, it is later than you think for your earthly life at best, is only a blink of an eye between two eternities.

Take it that you have died today, and your life's story is ended; and henceforward regard what future time may be given you as uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.

The doctors told me' -- her voice sang on a confidential note-- 'that if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dead, and in his grave--long in his grave.

Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

There are many things which swallow up men's thoughts while they live, which they will think little of when they are dying. Hundreds are wholly absorbed in political schemes and seem to care for nothing but the advancement of their own party. Myriads are buried in business and money matters and seem to neglect everything else but this world.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

It's true that Darwin didn't live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn't a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.