mortality

If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.

Mist to mist, drops to drops. For water thou art, and unto water shalt thou return.

Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

It was truer to my father to let the songs he'd sung die with him, little by little, averse at a time. How could these art-mongers constantly ignore the mortality of beauty, a pleonasm if ever I'd heard one?

The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don__ change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it__ that of a nation or a single human being.

Most people do not mind dying, as long as that does not happen today.

If there were something that Mother Nature or God could do with money, She or He would have sold immortality to the rich a long time ago.

You need to be greedy or ignorant to truly want to live forever.

Death is number one on the list of things that we wish were possible to leave behind when we escaped barbarism.

Death would not surprise us as often as it does, if we let go of the misbelief that newborns are less mortal than the elderly.

Attending a funeral would leave the average person insane, if they truly believed that sooner or later they are also going to die.

I want to feel the rush of death, the high of utter nothingness, the fragility of my own mortality. Let it slip through my fingers like sand and when it's gone for good, I'll be none the wiser.

But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.

May you find what you are looking for and realize it is not the answer.

This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.

Oh you, my generation!- we were a lovely lot! Sharp minds- arguing all the time and brittle bodies and even more brittle laughter- and all the time knowing that we were growing up to die.

She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing__ver instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth!