Aging is a mortal term that my immortal spirit doesn’t quite grasp.

It is odd that the Bible says, ‘God created man,’ whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, ‘The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,’ whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the...

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What’s the trouble?

Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk...

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?” “I do,” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you’ve grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

A life is not a waste of time

You will always be special to someone. Unless you grow so old, everyone you knew went ahead

I knew the end would come, one day. I knew my life deserved to be over. Yet, even knowing that, I was no less fearful.

Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,it’s dark to me.We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth–we call it life. We know no other.The underworld’s a blankand all the rest just fantasy.

The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.

Without time, you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity….Time is what gives life significance.

Accepting one’s age and mortality is a sign that you’ve now become an adult. Once you realize you no longer fit in the same jeans you did when you were 30, and the spicy foods you loved when you were younger now like to revisit you at 2 AM, you come to realize that with...

Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.

The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we’re likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we’re forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?’Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. ‘What? Who still believes nowadays?”It isn’t that simple. I don’t mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I’m no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new–do you happen to know if there was ever a...

There is not love of life without despair about life.

There are some fights none of us can win.

I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon

I know exactly what you mean.

To Suspect your Own Mortality is to Know the Beginning of Terror; To Learn Irrefutably that you are mortal is to Know the End of Terror.

If you can’t sublimate your fear of mortality into sex with your best friend, what’s it there for?

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.

Sometimes it seemed as if he’d always been very old. People said that time lasted for ever when you were young. That was lies. Lies and rosy spectacles. His spectacles were steel frames and time was those tattoos on Vasco’s arm. They were more like time than anything else. Once, in the Empire of Junk,...

This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.

Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.

For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.

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.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

This guy has a look on his face like he’s just realized that one day he will most assuredly die. Killing someone has a way of focusing our minds on our own mortality. I mean I imagine it does, and not that I’d know from personal experience.

We know from studies that these treatments do reduce mortality considerably, but we were interested in whether they work equally well in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.

I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia

A Cathedral Façade at MidnightAlong the sculptures of the western wallI watched the moonlight creeping:It moved as if it hardly moved at allInch by inch thinly peepingRound on the pious figures of freestone, broughtAnd poised there when the Universe was wroughtTo serve its centre, Earth, in mankind’s thought.The lunar look skimmed scantly toe, breast, arm,Then...

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. ‘What did they do to you?’Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. ‘They’-he looks about the Chapel-‘cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The...

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!

Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word.

We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.

Nothing can last forever. There isn’t any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn’t fade out at last.

Your only real problem is mortality! No religion can solve this problem, but science can do!

I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric productAnd look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.

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.

Dès que Séraphine l’a laissé seul, Gontran se jette à genoux au pied du lit ; il enfonce son front dans les draps, mais ne parvient pas à pleurer ; aucun élan ne soulève son cœur. Ses yeux désespérément restent secs. Alors il se relève. Il regarde ce visage impassible. Il voudrait, en ce moment...

The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I’m not. I’m only afraid of dying wrong.

Me, I’m living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino’s disease, which could lay me in the grave most anytime. Not that I mind too much; I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do. But … as you know, one would like to continue doing the good things over...

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.