Mortality Quotes

“Just because you've faced your own mortality, it doesn't make it any less frightening.”

“My friends are Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, and we're singing about mortality, getting older. It's an interesting time.”

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

“I heard them tearing at it. It was the sound of mortality.”

“As you get older, subconsciously you start thinking about mortality and protecting your offspring. It opens up a whole new avenue of life experiences.”

“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”

“I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.”

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

“I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (…) That was a very different thing from wanting to die.”

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

“I am now faced with mortality. Definitely not the most generous move.”

“Mortality is very different when you're 20 to when you're 50.”

“Great art comes from passion, from a need to expose human spirit in the face of mortality, the small cruelties and heroisms that make up daily life -- that's where great work comes from, and if you enable students in this way to discover those impulses and observations in themselves, those heroisms and cruelties in themselves, you create an atmosphere in which art can emerge.”

“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.”

“We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings.”

“Our responsibility is to learn to draw upon the power of the Atonement. Otherwise, we walk through mortality relying solely on our own strength.”

“His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.”

“The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.”

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

“We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.”