Mortality Quotes - Page 15

• Mental agitations and eating cares are more injurious to health, and destructive of life, than is commonly imagined, and could their effects be collected, would make no inconsiderable figure in the bills of mortality.

  William Falconer

  Agitation, Care, Bills

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• It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Dream, Truth, Past

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1989). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”

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• I am not what I ought to be! Ah! how imperfect and deficient! - I am not what I wish to be! I 'abhor what is evil,' and I would 'cleave to what is good!' - I am not what I hope to be! Soon, soon, I shall put off mortality: and with mortality all sin and imperfection! Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was - a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the Apostle, and acknowledge; By the grace of God, I am what I am!

  John Newton

  Evil, Imperfection, Grace

  The Christian Spectator, Volume 3 (p. 186), 1821; later quoted in "The Christian Pioneer" edited by Joseph Foulkes Winks (p. 84), 1856.

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• The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by [high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality], while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European standards.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Pregnancy, Sexually Transmitted Diseases

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• Child mortality since 2000 is down by 2.65 million a year. That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day. ... It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news.

  Edward de Bono

  Motivation, Children, Inspiration

  "The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news)". The TED Interview, www.ted.com. February, 2013.

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• Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. . . . Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Educational, Australia

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• On and on eternally
  Shall your altered fluid run,
  Bud and bloom and go to seed;
  But your singing days are done

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Running, Singing, Bud

  Edna St Vincent, Edna St. Vincent Millay (2013). “The Edna St. Vincent Millay Collection”, p.187, eBookIt.com

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• I suppose you do think about the time that's allotted to you more than when you were younger. The mortality thing obviously has a stronger pull for you. It's an imminent truth; it's not necessarily a bad thing. You realize - much earlier than my age now - that you won't be able to play for England's football team, just to take a really crass example. So you can't have that life again. Unless you believe in reincarnation or whatever. Reincarnation? That's a whole other question. I find people who talk about that sort of thing in interviews idiotic. And I don't want to go down with them.

  Mick Jagger

  Football, Team, Believe

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• Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

  George Santayana

  Men, Soul, Vision

  'Little Essays' (1920) 'Ideal Immortality'

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• Well, we're all going to die, so mortality is a part of writing and life.

  Alex Lemon

  Writing

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• All that I can say is that we are spending far more per capita than people in any other country, and our health care outcomes are in many cases worse in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality and so forth.

  Bernie Sanders

  Country, People, Care

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
  Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
  A cornice on the Third National Bank.

  Allen Tate

  Vocabulary, Hermes, Mythology

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.11, Macmillan

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• I don't mean to say that you shouldn't take care of your body, or want to keep it from dying. But it doesn't have the same hold as when you totally identify yourself as the body. To recognize the tenderness of mortality, the fragility of your life form and all life forms, including cosmic life forms, is to be humbled in a deep way that is actually enlivening.

  Gangaji

  Mean, Dying, Care

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Awakening in the morning returns us to life, and to awareness of death.

  Mason Cooley

  Life, Morning, Awakening

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• Life is used up all the same, whether we save, spend, or waste it.

  Mason Cooley

  Life, Waste, Used

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• One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Writing, Artist, People

  Catherine Drinker Bowen (1961). “The Nature of the Artist: An Address Delivered at the Dedication Ceremonies for Lee Pattison Recital Hall, Wilbur Hall, Mary Kimberly Residence Hall”

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• There is only one kind of life insurance, and that is pure protection based on a mortality table. All others are pure protection plus a cash value element that I call 'funny' banking.

  Venita VanCaspel

  Banking, Elements, Cash

  Venita VanCaspel (1986). “Money dynamics for the new economy”, Simon & Schuster

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• I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

  Donald Fagen

  Mother, Thinking, Talking

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• It is comparatively a faint and reflected beauty that is admired, not an essential and intrinsic one. It is because the old are weak, feel their mortality, and think that they have measured the strength of man. They will not boast; they will be frank and humble. Well, let them have the few poor comforts they can keep. Humility is still a very human virtue. They look back on life, and so see not into the future. The prospect of the young is forward and unbounded, mingling the future with the present.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Humility, Humble

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.110, Delphi Classics

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• I feel prematurely old. I'm actually having this major belated quarter-life crisis. I'm turning 30 in a couple of weeks. I've been thinking a lot about mortality. A lot about what I'm going to do with my life and how to enjoy it. One of the things I'm going to work on is being more spontaneous, letting go, embracing the beauty of come-what-may.

  Chris Pine

  Letting Go, Couple, Thinking

  "Chris Pine in Details: 'I think I'll be more like ... the George Clooney'" by Sophia Savage, www.indiewire.com. October 19, 2010.

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• I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person. People's parents die at various ages, but my father died of mortality. He died of being an old person. Illness and stuff happened, but essentially, he was old and he was going to die.

  Tamara Jenkins

  Mother, Father, Home

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live in every moment to nameless abysses, and the way language itself is beautifully, tragically, thrillingly insufficient...these are some of the engines that drive the poem. It's natural to want to turn away from these things. But we have to face them, as best we can, at least sometimes. Poetry can help us in that nearly impossible work.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Helping, Impossible, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow claspest the limits of mortality.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Time, Ebb And Flow, Limits

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1874). “The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.292

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• And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men too, when they, at their birth, have grey hair on their temples.

  Hesiod

  Men, Hair, Race

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• Like children, the elders are a burden. But unlike children, they offer no hope or promise. They are a weight and an encumbrance and a mirror of our own mortality. It takes a person of great heart to see past this fact and to see the wisdom the elders have to offer, and so serve them out of gratitude for the life they have passed on to us.

  Kent Nerburn

  Gratitude, Children, Heart

  Kent Nerburn (2014). “Letters to My Son: A Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love”, p.203, New World Library

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