Quotes about Mortality

We have one life; it soon will be past; what we do for God is all that will last.

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.

All is ephemeral--fame and the famous as well.

Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.

He (God) remembers that we are but shadows and dust, therefore what we do in this life echoes in eternity.

He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will himself also die very soon.

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man—yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live death is nigh at hand while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.

Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.

Accursed be he who willingly saddens an immortal spirit---doomed to infamy in later, wiser ages, doomed in future stages of his own being to deadly penance, only short of death.

I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.