30 Quotes About Mortality

The inevitability of mortality has captivated the human mind throughout history, inspiring profound reflections and poignant expressions from thinkers, writers, and philosophers. These musings on the transient nature of life can offer solace, serve as a stark reminder to cherish the present, and prompt introspection about our existence and legacy. In this curated collection of the top 30 quotes about mortality, we delve into the diverse perspectives and insights that have emerged across different cultures and eras. Whether you're seeking comfort, motivation, or a deeper understanding of life's fleeting nature, these quotes offer a rich tapestry of wisdom to explore and ponder.

1. “You have to give up! you have to give up!You have to realize that someday you will die,Until you know that, you are useless!” - Chuck Palahniuk

2. “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” - Chuck Palahniuk

3. “I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.” - Lord George Gordon Byron

4. “Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.” - Markus Zusak

5. “A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...” - Bertrand Russell

6. “The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” - Carl Sagan

7. “I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.” - Ayn Rand

8. “Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.” - Peter S. Beagle

9. “To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.” - Christopher Hitchens

10. “Krishna was once asked what was the most miraculous thing in all creation, and he replied, "That a man should wake each morning and believe deep in his heart that he will live forever, even though he knows that he is doomed.” - Christopher Pike

11. “I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.” - Marilynne Robinson

12. “The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.” - Tanith Lee

13. “Life is only precious because it ends, kid.” - Rick Riordan

14. “He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time.” - Rupert Thomson

15. “She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.” - Rupert Thomson

16. “Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.” - Criss Jami

17. “Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.” - H. Rider Haggard

18. “You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.” - Denis Diderot

19. “Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.” - C.S. Lewis

20. “Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.” - George Bernard Shaw

21. “If you can't sublimate your fear of mortality into sex with your best friend, what's it there for?” - Justin Taylor

22. “I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.” - Neal Stephenson

23. “I don't see how you mortals do it, these feelings you must endure. they will ruin you in the end.” - Julie Kagawa

24. “Hence, in a season of calm weatherThough inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal sea” - William Wordsworth

25. “Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.” - Omar Khayyam Edward Fitzgerald

26. “You have never talked to a mere mortal.” - C.S. Lewis

27. “You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

28. “It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and on one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn't expect anybody to love me...” - MacDonald Harris

29. “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

30. “The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.” - Ally Condie