#mortality

The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#apprehension #deep #earliest #fears #glimpse

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#mortality #courage

You cannot have the right to do what is wrong! ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#means-justifying-the-ends #moral-courage #courage

Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#immortality #love #death

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try. ↗

— Ekaterina Sedia

#decisions #mortality #regret #souls #death

My conscience is killing me, isn't it? And when you're immortal that can be a really long and ignominious death ↗

— Anne Rice

#death

It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years’ time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal. ↗

— Neel Burton

#happiness #immortality #meaning #time #death

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are harder to kill then people, but they can be killed, in the end. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#gods #ideal #immortality #death

Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word. ↗

— Ivan Doig

#mortality #death

You do not need God and Death as precursors to immortality. You need Life as a great fire, setting you and everything around you into a blaze. ↗

— Clare Morgan

#life #death