S. Jay Olshansky Quotes

Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Unlike other animals, all of which are undoubtedly oblivious to their eventual demise, humans are fully aware that their time on Earth is limited. This is a reality that for most individuals is difficult if not impossible to bear.

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.

We've spent the last few millennia aware that senescence is horrible but knowing nevertheless that it's inevitable. We've had to find some mechanism to put it out of our minds so we can get on with our miserably short lives.

I always know I can die at any moment.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Happens to everybody. Horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.

You realize that however much you don't think about death - or think that's for other people - you're just an organism living from day to day. I'm just grateful I'm here.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

We're here for such a short period of time.

We're all dying. We're all in the process of oxidizing. Everyone of us is in the process of oxidizing, so to sort of interrupt one aspect of that while everything else goes on, it's a freak show.

Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly; to every day we live, a day we die.

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.

I'm happier because I had to face what all of us try not to face: that we're going to die. It's a fact.

Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live.

What makes us really human is it's in the presence of death that we start valuing life.