Mortality Quotes - Page 15

• What happens with experiences that really move us deeply, that really effect us? They make the world new again. What it does is it heightens our sense of mortality.

  Bill Henson

  Moving, Doe, World

  Source: www.americansuburbx.com

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• When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Profound, Way, Ends

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• Talking about your hair becomes a framework for talking about your vanity, your self-esteem, your relationships with your family, your mortality.

  Elizabeth Benedict

  Self Esteem, Vanity, Hair

  Source: nytlive.nytimes.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• The true bounds and limitations, whereby human knowledge is confined and circumscribed,... are three: the first, that we do not so place our felicity in knowledge, as we forget our mortality: the second, that we make application of our knowledge, to give ourselves repose and contentment, and not distates or repining: the third, that we do not presume by the contemplation of Nature to attain to the mysteries of God.

  Francis Bacon

  Knowledge, Giving, Contentment

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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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• 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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• I'm a student of history and know that civilizations get lost - they are born and die - and so I recognize the tender mortality of our civilization. I'm not saying I'm separate from the despair of that, but I'm not controlled by the despair of that.

  Gangaji

  Despair, Students

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• Life's so brief,” she goes on. “We're, at every juncture, staring mortality in the face. It's the very least we can do if we think it will be of any interest or value, to share the past. And although mine's been crooked, it's also been splendid. It's taught me to be vulnerable and humble, to write this book.

  Kate Mulgrew

  Book, Humble, Writing

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• My dad was an agent for Met Life. In the '50s, I remember the mortality rate was something like - you had - 58 was the average age. Then it was moved up to 62, and then 65, 68.

  Willard Scott

  Dad, Average, Agents

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• On the theory of the soul's mortality, the inferiority of women's capacity is easily accounted for: Their domestic life requires no higher faculties either of mind or body. This circumstance vanishes and becomes absolutely insignificant, on the religious theory: The one sex has an equal task to perform as the other: Their powers of reason and resolution ought also to have been equal, and both of them infinitely greater than at present.

  David Hume

  Religious, Sex, Women

  David Hume, Richard H. Popkin (1998). “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Second Edition)”, p.93, Hackett Publishing

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