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“The decision to be positive is not one that disregards or belittles the sadness that exists. It is rather a conscious choice to focus on the good and to cultivate happiness--genuine happiness. Happiness is not a limited resource. And when we devote our energy and time to trivial matters, and choose to stress over things that ultimately are insignificant. From that point, we perpetuate our own sadness, and we lose sight of the things that really make us happy and rationalize our way out of doing amazing things.”
― Christopher Aiff

“You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

“If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

“Take too much time, and time will take you.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon

“I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.”
― Pablo Casals

“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“It is the way of mortals. They fling themselves at life and emerge broken.”
― Patricia Briggs, Fair Game

“Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Hence, in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea”
― William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

“Death is the only serious preoccupation in life.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Man is mortal, and as the professor so rightly said mortality can come so suddenly”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo... No, that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy...?”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Legacy is not what's left tomorrow when you're gone. It's what you give, create, impact and contribute today while you're here that then happens to live on.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“I don't see how you mortals do it, these feelings you must endure. they will ruin you in the end.”
― Julie Kagawa, The Iron Queen

“I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?”
― H.G. Wells, The Food of the Gods

“Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.”
― Omar Khayyam Edward Fitzgerald

“I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting.

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“A Cathedral Façade at Midnight

Along the sculptures of the western wall
I watched the moonlight creeping:
It moved as if it hardly moved at all
Inch by inch thinly peeping
Round on the pious figures of freestone, brought
And poised there when the Universe was wrought
To serve its centre, Earth, in mankind’s thought.

The lunar look skimmed scantly toe, breast, arm,
Then edged on slowly, slightly,
To shoulder, hand, face; till each austere form
Was blanched its whole length brightly
Of prophet, king, queen, cardinal in state,
That dead men’s tools had striven to simulate;
And the stiff images stood irradiate.

A frail moan from the martyred saints there set
Mid others of the erection
Against the breeze, seemed sighings of regret
At the ancient faith’s rejection
Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress
Of Reason’s movement, making meaningless.”
― Thomas Hardy, Collected Poems

“We are temporarily immortal, until we have fulfilled God's plans for our lives...then we become temporarily mortal, waiting to become permanently immortal at last”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Shall a man
grave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them on
the water? Nay, oh /She/, I will live my day, and grow old with my
generation, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten.”
― H. Rider Haggard, She

“This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.”
― Ally Condie, Crossed

“Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-Baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlett, still
Clasped empty in the other, and
One sees with a sharp tender shock
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long,
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see,
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes being
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came

Washing at their identity.
Now helpless in the hollow
Of an unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains.

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost-true:
What will survive of us is love.

- An Arundel Tomb”
― Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

“Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal - and that no man can escape his destiny.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“Creating is the closest thing to being immortal.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.”
― Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul

“Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.”
― Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

“Your only real problem is mortality! No religion can solve this problem, but science can do!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Idag samlar vi skor och bilar, igÃ¥r flintyxor. Utan tvivel har arkeologer funnit betydligt fler flintyxor än vad människan rimligtvis behövde. Jag tror att flintyxorna handlar om en längtan, kanske en rädsla. Om jag bara har tillräckligt mÃ¥nga flintyxor, eller skor, eller ett nyrenoverat kök sÃ¥ kan inget ont hända. Det är den där dödsÃ¥ngesten igen. Den otäcka insikten att allt, allt, allt är förgängligt. Jag kommer att dö, men mina flintyxor kommer att finnas kvar. (Och de fanns ju kvar, eller hur? Men vad hjälper det?)”
― Ann Heberlein, Ett gott liv