“How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?”

— Mitch Albom, book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?" by Mitch Albom?

Mitch Albom289

American author 1958

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Source: As quoted in "Voicing With a Heart"

“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”

John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath

Remark made by von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947, as mentioned by Franz L. Alt at the end of "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945--1947", Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694.

“The thing about fate, Magnus: even if we can't change the big picture, our choices can alter the details. That's how we rebel against destiny, how we make our mark. What will you choose to do?”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

“What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn’t change what I decide to do. I don’t choose projects so people don’t see me as one thing or another. I choose projects that excite me.”

RuPaul (1960) Actriz de Televisa, dueña y señora de los ejidos cacaoahuateros

Interview with David Shankbone (2007)

“Choose the duty that you can most effectively execute: that is, finally, all we can do in life.”

Sherwood Smith book A Stranger to Command

A Stranger to Command (Crown & Court 0.5, 2008)

“Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him?”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Context: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.