Quotes about Mortality

How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! how glad would lay me down, as in my mother's lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.

O fairest of creation! last and best of all God's works! creature in whom excell'd whatever can to sight or thought be form'd, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, Defac'd, deflower'd, and now to Death devote?

Before mine eyes in opposition sitsGrim Death my son and foe.

Govern well thy appetite, lest sin surprise thee, and her black attendant, Death.

We have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either.' There are no U-Hauls behind hearses.

Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don't presume you will have it tomorrow, and don't waste it today.

As they witnessed in drooping flower and falling leaf the first signs of decay, Adam and his companion mourned more deeply than men now mourn over their dead. The death of the frail, delicate flowers was indeed a cause of sorrow; but when the goodly trees cast off their leaves, the scene brought vividly to mind the stern fact that death is the portion of every living thing.

When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best—and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out.

I am not sure whether the virtue of holy envy requires holy humility or creates it, but the two are clearly related. After you have allowed the other to define herself, listening carefully to all the ways in which she is not you, it is hard to overlook the fact that you and she are made of the same basic material. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

There was a time when you were not. There never will be a time when you will not be.

Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine.

In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.