Tom Stoppard Quotes

We're the only species that can look into the future and know that we're going to die one day, and it causes all sorts of cognitive stress on your system.

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.

I was fascinated by mortality. Most people are, even if they don't admit it.

Humans will die like all living things do, but we have the added burden of knowing that we will.

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.

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.

A person is a process, one that leads to death.

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

But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.

Our time on Earth is so random.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.

I've always been somebody who's acutely aware of my mortality.

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.

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

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

I am really curious about life, about why we are all here. I notice my skin is ageing, things are changing, I've seen people dying, so that's the train we are all on.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

The moment you're born you're done for.

Dogs are a really amazing eye opener for us humans because their lives are compressed into such a short period, so we can see them go from puppyhood to adolescence to strong adulthood and then into their sunset years in 10 to 12 years. It really drives home the point of how finite all our lives are.

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.

When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.

The great problem of humanity is life and death. Every person dreams of becoming invisible one day.

We all have to die some day. Not very many immortals have shown up in this world.

The body is just a rooming house.

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.