Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet’s four and a half thousand million...

Hence, in a season of calm weatherThough inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Problems are mortal. Solutions live forever.

Human says time goes by -Time says human goes by

And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or...

Death is the only equality guaranteed in life. A poor man will die just as surely as a rich man.

Maybe I’ll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it...

If you don’t make peace with your own mortality, you’ll never know what it’s like to truly be alive.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

Legacy is not what’s left tomorrow when you’re gone. It’s what you give, create, impact and contribute today while you’re here that then happens to live on.

You’re mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.

As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And,...

The idea that all souls are mortal is the only notion surely terminating love and all its forms.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we...

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at...

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...

Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

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...

The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become...

Wolf Winter,’ she said, her voice small. ‘I wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is.’He was silent for a long time. ‘It’s the kind of winter that will remind us we are...

Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food....

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don’t believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we’re only given eighty summers or so per lifetime,...

They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life’s value.

Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

[T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.

Darker and darker, he said; farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young – and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the...

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...

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,’...

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...