Quotes & Sayings About Mortality Of Man

We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment. — Paul Auster

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

My father had the spirit and integrity of a scientist, but he was a salesman. I remember asking him the question "How can a man of integrity be a salesman?"
He said to me, "Frankly, many salesmen in the business are not straightforward
they think it's a better way to sell. But I've tried being straightforward, and I find it has its advantages. In fact, I wouldn't do it any other way. If the customer thinks at all, he'll realize he has had some bad experience with another salesman, but hasn't had that kind of experience with you. So in the end, several customers will stay with you for a long time and appreciate it. — Richard Feynman

When a general name stands for each and every individual which it is a name of, or in other words, which it denotes, it is said by logicians to be distributed, or taken distributively. Thus, in the proposition, All men are mortal, the subject, Man, is distributed, because mortality is affirmed of each and every man. — John Stuart Mill

What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, ... the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal; ... would that be a life to disregard? — Plato

We should not manifest surprise at any sort of condition into which we are born, and which should be lamented by no one, simply because it is equally ordained for all. Yes, I say, equally ordained; for a man might have experienced even that which he has escaped. And an equal law consists, not of that which all have experienced, but of that which is laid down for all. Be sure to prescribe for your mind this sense of equity; we should pay without complaint the tax of our mortality. — Seneca.

You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for. — David Gerrold

Voted worst in show the last two years got a refill on my tears another bottle of foam yellowed clear.
Old man twitching on the train reminds us of mortality
the snow everywhere reminds us of the rain. — Brendan Kelly

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'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy ... ? — Yevgeny Zamyatin

I will not stand by and let any man believe his death is an act of one of the gods. They don't deserve the credit. This is just nature, a side effect of mortality - H — Katie Hamstead

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

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth's global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of mortality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser's attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who - as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen - was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that mortality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain. — Ronald Carter

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic. — Winston Churchill

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. — Charles Lamb

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs. — Gene Wolfe

The artist is unique in his view of the world. He does not see material wealth as his ultimate goal and desire. He sees far beyond his own existence; his own fragile and corruptible mortality. He does not seek to profit through the exploitation of his fellow man. His is the life of expression; of sacrifice. He strives to evoke change within the vast diversities of human perception. — Tom Lazenby

The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. — Sam Keen

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

A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection. — Philip Roth

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made. — Alfred Tennyson

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.
(from the novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name) — Jim Harrison

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert. — Willa Cather

He was in his secret room in the heart now. Having entered he could be bold. A man hasn't to be on his best behavior in Heaven; he can kick the furniture around. He can stoop down and picks up lumps of mortality without being born again to die. — Patrick Kavanagh

Padma, My darling. I have told you countless times that all these rites and rituals are meaningless. I will show you what God is. Just Look into the eyes of your mother Padma, and what you see is God. Look into the heart of a noble man, and what you see is God. Look at the lotus feet of your teacher, and what you see is God. God, as we know, is just a manifestation of our innate insecurity and fear of mortality. I do bow down dutifully before all Gods, but I really do not expect much from anyone. As far as I am concerned, I am yet to see any God in this big, wide and cruel world, except in the eyes of my mother and in feet of my teachers. — Biju Vasudevan

When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. — Vladimir Nabokov

[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

It is an end with priests and gods, if man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself - it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alones is mortality: Thou shalt not know. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The man in the street has unfortunately been sold the idea that the breakthrough cure for cancer is just around the corner ... The very prospect of effective treatment seems so remote that it doesn't even enter into the speculative day-to-day conversation of people engaged in cancer research ... New treatments have not produced any detectable decline in the total annual cancer mortality, even for children. — John Cairns

On the other hand, the conditions of human existence - life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth - can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences - anthropology, psychology, biology, etc. - which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth's conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth. 2 — Hannah Arendt

What's a man worth without love ? $.89 worth of chemicals." Hawkeye Pierce — M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team

Penetrating the walls and rising to the stars, the music continued, the slow movement of the Eroica Symphony, crying out against pain, crying out against the injustice of man's mortality. — Jose Saramago

Cream - the richest, sweetest part of milk - is of course our first flavor, the taste, in a spoon, of life's first freshness and innocence, long before we ever encounter the taste of cooked food. And what is smoke - or ashes, with which one of the butters has been dusted - if not the very opposite of that freshness? There it is, innocence and experience mingled in a spoonful of ice cream. Bittor, whom no one would describe as a sunny man, has figured out a way to pass a fleeting, chill shadow of mortality over the formerly uncomplicated happiness of ice cream. A — Michael Pollan

Strong is the man who can pull apart his own pride and hopelessness; courageous is the man who then reaches in, near his most vital inner workings to pull out the slivers and shards of mortality that have worked their way in.
It's not about determining the shade of grey the white paint in the bucket has become, but finding where the black paint is dripping from, and stopping it. — Michael Brent Jones

Charlotte came in herself, like a big bridal edifice in her veil and other lace, carrying long-stemmed flowers. With her there wasn't much hiding of the behind-the-scenes of life to keep a man in the bonds of love, as Lucretius advises when he tells you to make allowances for mortality. You only had to see her practical mouth to know everything about mortality was admitted in advance, though she did for form's sake all that other women do. Her frankness gave her a kind of nobility. — Saul Bellow

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal - there's the trick! — Mikhail Bulgakov

Volume II: Chapter V
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I - I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever. — Mary Shelley

From a man getting ready to die, he had turned into a man falling in love at a most unexpected time. Suddenly all the pieces that he thought he's long ago put into place had to be moved. Spiritually, life, family, mortality, faith, and love- he found himself rethinking their meanings again and not wanting to die. The Forty Rules of Love, 225 — Elif Shafak

All the works of mortal man have been doomed to mortality, and in the midst of things which have been destined to die, we live! — Seneca.

The doctrine of pre-existence pours a wonderful flood of light upon the otherwise mysterious problem of man's origin. It shows that man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father, prior to coming upon the earth in a temporal body to undergo an experience in mortality. — Heber J. Grant

As far as this life is concerned, [Jesus] was born of Mary and of Elohim; he came here as an offspring of that Holy Man who is literally our Father in heaven. He was born in mortality in the literal and full sense as the Son of God. He is the Son of his father in the same sense that all morals are the sons and daughters of their fathers. — Bruce R. McConkie

Remember that ofttimes the wisdom of God appears as foolishness to men, but the greatest single lesson we can learn in mortality is that when God speaks and a man obeys, that man will always be right. — Thomas S. Monson

I don't care if I tell that story and John Roderick gets up afterward and yells, 'I hope you enjoyed the white privilege, mortality comedy of John Hodgman!' That's me! I'm going to play a sad Handsome Family song at the end and I guarantee you everyone is going to love it because, sometimes, you need a grown man or woman to tell you what you like. — John Hodgman

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight
will abide forever.
Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that will make that happen,
as you yourself are the mirror and image
of those who did not live as long as you
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. — Jorge Luis Borges

Plato spoke of the Sisters of Fate on the last 3 pages of his book, "The Republic" when he said: "Then the Sisters of Fate take all of our choices and weave them on their loom into the fabric of destiny. Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors' or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser - God is justified" [Quote from Plato's Republic written 360BCE In the Public Domain] — D.M. Hoover

Writing stretches me to my limits and affirms my potential, all while making me aware of my flaws, my mortality, and how much more I have to learn. It's a singular feeling, both spiritual and corporeal, and I like to think it sparks the same inspiration and curiosity in a child that it does in an old man. — Kit Williamson

She who can paint a masterpiece or write a book that will influence millions deserves the plaudits and admiration of mankind. But she who would willingly and anxiously rear successfully a family of beautiful healthy sons and daughters whose lives reflect the teachings of the gospel, deserves the highest honors that man can give, and the choicest blessings of God. In fact, in her high duty and service to humanity, endowing with mortality eternal spirits, she is a co-partner with the Great Creator Himself. — David O. McKay

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil. — Ernest Becker

The endless ocean was his sole companion , and on some deeply sentimental level, it seemed sufficient. Almost apt. He aligned himself with Thoreau and Tolstoy, he felt like their peers. The kinship with nature devoted humans to a mythical state, a heightened persona beyond the reach of mere mortals. At least that was what he told himself on the lonely nights when insomnia played on his fears and the howling wind pierced through his soul. — Adelheid Manefeldt

A Greek philosopher said, 'All men think it is only the other man who is mortal'. The way we scurry about accumulating things is testimony to our unspoken doctrine that we are exceptions to the law of death. The events of September 11, 2001, were a shocking reminder to millions of Americans of something we should have already understood - our mortality. — Randy Alcorn

It is comparatively a faint and reflected beauty that is admired, not an essential and intrinsic one. It is because the old are weak, feel their mortality, and think that they have measured the strength of man. They will not boast; they will be frank and humble. Well, let them have the few poor comforts they can keep. Humility is still a very human virtue. They look back on life, and so see not into the future. The prospect of the young is forward and unbounded, mingling the future with the present. — Henry David Thoreau

The power of the Will in a man, is favoured by the Heavens. The man who sets his Heart and Word onto something, and says "I will" no matter what obstacle is placed in his way - joins the ranks of the demi-gods. All else remain in mortality and are soon forgotten. — C. JoyBell C.

The fact that some governments, churches and numerous corrupted individuals have tried to reduce such behavior from criminal offence to personal privilege dose not change the nature nor the seriousness of the practice. This woe is pronounced upon those who would pervert standards of mortality and decency. They seek man's approval of that which God had condemned. They have been successful in getting legislation passed to make such perversion legal and acceptable by society. — Spencer W. Kimball

Secret of man's Mortality; Man has transformed from immortal to become a mere mortal being all because of our mental love for sex and evil. — Auliq Ice

In the distance Richard could see the skyscrapers of Los Angeles rising out of the ocean; barnacle crusted concrete and steel emerging from crashing waves. Once a symbol of economic might, they were now a macabre monument to the mortality of man. — Alexander Ferrick

Listen, I'm not ... Oh man, this is crazy. I can't do this. — James Dashner

This "vision" of the Self is described in the Upanishads as Liberation (moksha). It is a freedom, a release, from doubt, from uncertainty, from the fears attending ignorance, forever. All questions are answered; all desires and causes for sorrow are put to rest; for thereafter, a man knows the secret of all existence. All previous notions of limitation and mortality, all darkness of ignorance, is swept away in the all-illuminating light of Truth: — Swami Abhayananda

John declared that "Christ received not of the fulness at the first," but that he "continued from grace to grace until he received a fulnesss and thus he was called the Son of God, because he received not of the fulness at the first." Thus is it with us all. We must work out our salvation and exaltation by coming to this earth. Man must be born into mortality and live and die that he may continue in his progress toward eternal life and exaltation. — Alma P Burton

There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life. — Joseph Conrad

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own. — Bertrand Russell

Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change. — Connie Willis

The last decisive energy of a rational courage which confides in the Supreme Power is very sublime. It makes a man who intrepidly dares every thing that can oppose or attack him within the sphere of mortality-who will press toward his object while death is impending over him-who would retain his purpose unshaken amidst the ruins of the world. — Randolph Sinks Foster

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. — Bela Bartok

In order to survive, an animal must be born into a favoring or at least tolerant environment. Similarly, in order to achieve preservation and recognition, a specimen of fossil man must be discovered in intelligence, attested by scientific knowledge, and interpreted by evolutionary experience. These rigorous prerequisites have undoubtedly caused many still-births in human palaeontology and are partly responsible for the high infant mortality of discoveries of geologically ancient man. — Earnest Hooton