Reflection on Mortality Quotes

Let every man in mankind's frailtyConsider his last day; and let nonePresume on his good fortune until he findLife, at his death, a memory without pain.

It is important to look at death because it is a part of life. It is a sad thing, melancholy but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle - everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things.

Do you ever look at the sky and think, I'm glad I'm alive? After I heard System of a Down, I thought, I'm actually alive to hear the shittiest band of all time. Which is quite something when you think about it. Of all the bands that have gone before and all the bands that'll be in the future, I was around when the worst was around.

Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead

There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

Imagine how different a world might be if more leaders took time to ponder the finality of death before racing off to war.

Death makes a beautiful appeal to charity. When we look upon the dead form, so composed and still, the kindness and the love that are in us all come forth.

O remember In your narrowing dark hours That more things move Than blood in the heart.

I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.

As you are now so once were we.

I keep lot of my opinions to myself. My grandfather, who was a gravedigger, told me one day, 'Son, the next time you go by the cemetery, remember that a third of the people are in there because they got into other people's business.'

Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.

Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.

Suffering is a call to conversion: it reminds us of our frailty and vulnerability.

We who live in this nervous age would be wise to meditate on our lives and our days long and often before the face of God and on the edge of eternity. For we are made for eternity as certainly as we are made for time, and as responsible moral beings we must deal with both.

One of the things that we talked about was this idea of 'Memento Mori' - like the reminder of our own mortality - and so we were sort of trying to express that in our press photos. And it's one of the themes of the album [Modern Vampires of the City] as well.

The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak.

How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?

We see time's furrows on another's brow, And death intrench'd, preparing his assault; How few themselves in that just mirror see!

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.

Severally on the occasion of everything that thou doest, pause and ask thyself, if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives thee of this.