Mortality Reflection Quotes

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

This is the epitaph I want on my tomb: Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.

A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.

The eunuch had looked death in the face, so near he might have kissed her on the lips.

Look out, Death: I am coming.-Art thou not glad? what talks we'll have.-What memories of old battles.-Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained of those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth and yet last the longest in the dust.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

I have always at least, ever since I can remember had a kind of longing for death.

Consider in what condition both in body and soul a man should be when he is overtaken by death; and consider the shortness of life, the boundless abyss of time past and future, the feebleness of all matter.

When you attend a funeral, It is sad to think that sooner o' Later those you love will do the same for you. And you may have thought it tragic, Not to mention other adjec- Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do. (But don't you worry.

There is no man so blessed that some who stand by his deathbed won't hail the occasion with delight.

[On being indecisive and changeable:] On my gravestone I want inscribed: 'On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.

I will keep faith with death in my heart... For the sake of goodness, for the sake of love, Let no man's heart be ruled by death... The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the .emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.

I look back on being 17 and think, 'Oh my God, how did I not die?'

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling, and I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity...of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

I have died in so many spectacular ways, and I remember shooting them all, too. I imagine all those deaths will flash in front of me when I'm on my death bed, faced with the real thing.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun.

I had a stick of CareFree gum, but it didn't work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality.