Thine are these orbs of light and shade;Thou madest Life in man and brute;Thou madest Death; and lo, thy footIs on the skull which thou hast made.

The adult world that runs our school considers this a teachable moment (a new phrase for our era) where children will learn to process loss and grief and loneliness by sitting in the football bleachers and being presented with the truth of mortality. There’s nothing to be taught. Only something to be felt.

Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.

We’re all trying to come to terms with our mortality. Well, except for me, because I plan to live forever through the miracle of cloning.

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.

Take too much time, and time will take you.

O I will accompany the windUntil the chainOf my white bonesDrifts like fine sandAnd I become compassing.I become the wind.- Song of the Wind

You are like a god, like an immortal one,’ she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. ‘Oh, my love,’ I whispered back to her, ‘I am more mortal than all. It seems that a part of me dies every...

An Arundel TombSide by side, their faces blurred,The earl and countess lie in stone,Their proper habits vaguely shownAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,And that faint hint of the absurd -The little dogs under their feet.Such plainness of the pre-BaroqueHardly involves the eye, untilIt meets his left-hand gauntlett, stillClasped empty in the other, andOne sees with a...

I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you.

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose...

Unless there is swift intervention, growing numbers of people will become severely malnourished and the mortality rate will rapidly accelerate.

The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding.

But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

Death is every mortal’s life to be alive!

Even if their supplies of love are finite, they’ve figured out that life is, too, and they’re no longer rationing.

There are a few things I’ve learned over the years. One is that time doesn’t stop for anyone; hurdling forward and onward, unstoppable and catastrophic.

Golden lads and girls all must, like chimmney-sweepers, come to dust.

As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.

If on thoughts of death we are fed,Thus, a coffin, became my bed.

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There...

It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth—and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up—that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

Real dishes break. That’s how you know they’re real.

If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules – since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but simply of death itself, seen from a different angle.

Your faces are very beautiful,but they are wooden cages.You had better run from me.My words are fire.

And we went through AIDS… which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.

There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.

Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.

I do not understand how you know you only have one life if you have never died, because if you have never died, then you cannot possibly know if you would go on living a second life, or go on living no more lives.

That which is alive hath known death, and that which is dead can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.

Even if it’s being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it’s still only a temporary thing.

In the old world, we tend to drift along, victims to our own ignorance of the fact, that we can have what we want in the New World.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

Let this change you. Let this take hold in the very center of your soul. Write it on the walls of your heart. Let this emanate through every part of you, and trickle into every aspect of your life. You were not designed to be merely a good person, but that through the experience of...

You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn’t much time left.

Tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud-Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

I feel like this is more of an open, optimistic record, but there is a theme of mortality that floats through it. For me, I find myself being more obsessed with destinations and endings over the last couple years, even when something is going really well. I like the idea of having a love song...

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…

I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.

What could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream

Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass–the earth–into the second–eternity.

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,...

A small fact:You are going to die….does this worry you?

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of...

Who then to frail mortality shall trust but limns on water, or but writes in dust

She’s thirty-four years old. In fifty, sixty years, she’ll be dead, and everything reminds her of this fact but him. With Arnie, she imagines she might live forever.

Some leaves hang on longer but eventually they all fall.