philosophy of mortality Quotes

Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors.

If not exactly raging against the dying of the light, I was at least a little cross with it.

He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.

I'm possibly a very morbid person but I think about death a lot. I don't know if it's maybe from being on films that's often playing Harry [Potter] or I just think it's a natural thing that I have. It's something that I think about just because it's fascinating in a very alien kind of way.

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

Awareness of approach to death can be a beautiful thing, a frame into which we can put the work of art that is our life, our personal masterpiece.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

I don't really think I am interested in the macabre, but I am curious about death. That's normal... The only certainty in life is that we're all going to die. It would be unnatural not to think about death once in a while.

I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.

when your time came, it came, and that was that. You might say something smart on your way out, but you might just as easily say something stupid.

The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.

I don't want to die, obviously, but really, the wonder of life is amplified by the fact that it ends.

Being prepared to die is one of the great secrets of living.

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.

On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.

Live how we can, yet die we must.

Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end

The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?