Mortality

Mortality is the condition of being mortal, susceptible to death.

• To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.
  • Bodhidharma, in The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, p. 35

• Again, bhikkhus, as though he were to see a corpse thrown aside in a charnel ground, one, two, or three days dead, bloated, livid, and oozing matter, a bhikkhu compares this same body with it thus: 'This body too is of the same nature, it will be like that, it is not exempt from that fate.'
  • Gautama Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya, as translated by B. Nanamoli and B. Bodhi (1995), Sutta 10, Verse 14.

• He still had that marvelous swing, and what a follow-through, just beautiful, like a great golfer. But he was forty years old. He couldn’t run, he could hardly bend down for a ball, and of course he couldn’t hit the way he used to. One of the saddest things of all is when an athlete begins to lose it … and to see it happening to Babe Ruth, to see Babe Ruth struggling on a ball field, well, then you realize we’re all mortal and nothing lasts forever.
  • Elbie Fletcher, recalling Ruth's final season in Boston, which coincided with Fletcher's first; as quoted in Baseball When the Grass Was Real (1988) by Donald Honig, p. 60

• To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
  • Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), Book IV. The Court Lady.

• Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality.

• Blaise Pascal, Pensées, #347, W. F. Trotter, trans. (New York: 1958)

• It's our mortality that defines us, Soran. It's part of the truth of our existence.
  • Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) in Star Trek Generations (1994). Story by Brannon Braga, Ronald D. Moore and Rick Berman. See also: The beginning of Youtube Video "Picard Words of Wisdom: Cherish Every Moment. Now Will Never Come Again" (09.12.2019) by user "Major Grin".

• You mortals are so obtuse! Why do you persist in believing that life and death are such static and rigid concepts? Why I can take your life and give it back to you again with the snap of a finger!
  • the trickster god Q in the episode “Tapestry” of the American twentieth-century science fiction television show Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6

• You must drink quickly as from a rapid stream that will not always flow.
  • Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life”

• The ungodly ... reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,...

we were born by mere chance,

and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been,

for the breath in our nostrils is smoke,

and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts

when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes,

and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. ...

Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, ...

for God created us for incorruption,

and made us in the image of his own eternity.

• Wisdom of Solomon 2:1-23 NRSV

• At thirty, man suspects himself a fool,
  Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
  At fifty, chides his infamous delay,
  Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve,
  In all the magnanimity of thought;
  Resolves, and re-resolves, then dies the same.
  And why? because he thinks himself immortal,
  All men think all men mortal but themselves.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night I, line 417.

• Memento mori.
  • Remember death.
    • Roman proverb

• Mortality is man's invention; not in the logic of life.
  • Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades (1936)

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 530.

• "O Charidas, what of the underworld?"
  "Great darkness."
  "And what of the resurrection?"
  "A lie."
  "And Pluto?"
  "A fable; we perish utterly."
  • Callimachus, translation by Macnail in Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology. See also Callimachus, Epigrams, XIV, line 3. Anthologia Palatina, VII. 524.
• That flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust
  That measures all our time; which also shall
  Be crumbled into dust.
  • George Herbert, The Temple (1633), Church Monuments.

• Consider
  The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:—
  We are as they;
  Like them we fade away
  As doth a leaf.
  • Christina G. Rossetti, Consider.

• Hier ist die Stelle wo ich sterblich bin.
  • This is the spot where I am mortal.
  • Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos, I, 6, 67.

• The immortal could we cease to contemplate,
  The mortal part suggests its every trait.
  God laid His fingers on the ivories
  Of her pure members as on smoothèd keys,
  And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies.
  • Francis Thompson, Her Portrait, Stanza 7.

• I wrote my name upon the sand,
  And trusted it would stand for aye;
  But, soon, alas! the refluent sea
  Had washed my feeble lines away.
  • Horatio Alger, "Carving a Name", lines 1–4, Alger Street: The Poetry of Horatio Alger, Jr., ed. Gilbert K. Westgard II, p. 53 (1964).

• The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
  • Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard", line 36, The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, ed. H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson, p. 38 (1966). Originally published in 1751. "Nobody knew that [Major General James] Wolfe, reciting Gray's Elegy in 1759 as he rowed up the St. Lawrence [to Quebec] the night before his death, said that 'he would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French tomorrow,' until in 1815, in Vol. VII of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, appeared a biography of its secretary, John Robison, LL. D., professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who as a young man had been a midshipman in Wolfe's flotilla".—Carroll A. Wilson, "Familiar 'Small College' Quotations, II: Mark Hopkins and the Log", The Colophon, spring 1938, p. 204.

• Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead.
  When Death claims the light of my brow,
  No flowers of life will cheer me: instead
  You may give me my roses now!
  • Thomas F. Healey, "Give Me My Roses Now". The Home Book of Quotations, ed. Burton Stevenson, 10th ed., p. 1578 (1967). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
  Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
  Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
  Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!
  Vanish'd unseasonably …
  • John Keats, "Sonnet to Fanny Brawne", lines 5–9, The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 379 (1900).

• So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;
  Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.
  • Charles Kingsley, "Old and New", lines 3–4, Poems, p. 243 (1902).

• It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away". How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depth of affliction!
  • Abraham Lincoln, address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859; in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 3, p. 481–82. Many versions of this story exist. Another one is: "The Sultan asked for a Signet motto, that should hold good for Adversity or Prosperity. Solomon gave him, 'This also shall pass away.'"—Edward Fitzgerald, Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances, item 112, p. 80 (1901). The words In neez bogzarad, which can be translated, "This also shall pass", appear in the Diven of the twelfth century Persian poet and philosopher, Sana' of Ghazn, ed. Mahir Muaffa, p. 92 (1957).

• Above all, Hubert was a man with a good heart. And on this sad day it would be good for us to recall Shakespeare's words:

A good leg will fall. A straight back will stoop. A black beard will turn white. A curled pate will grow bald. A fair face will wither. A full eye will wax hollow. But a good heart is the sun and the moon. Or rather the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps its course truly. He taught us all how to hope and how to live, how to win and how to lose, he taught us how to live, and finally, he taught us how to die.

• • Walter Mondale, eulogy for former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, January 15, 1978, in the rotunda of the Capitol.—The Washington Post, January 16, 1978, p. 1. The Shakespeare quotation is a slight variation from Henry V, act V, scene ii.

• Philip, remember that thou art mortal.
  • Author unknown. Supposedly, words Philip of Macedon had a servant repeat in the audience-room. Reported in Samuel A. Bent, Short Sayings of Great Men (1882), p. 437. Similarly, "Remember thou, too, art a man". Words a slave would be bidden to whisper now and again to the triumphal conqueror returning in state to Rome. John L. Stoddard, Lectures, vol. 8 (1911), p. 263–64.

• Death
• Immortality
• Impermanence