Quotes about mortality (829 quotes, page 9)

“There are 2.9 hospital beds for every 1,000 people in the United States. That’s fewer than Turkmenistan (7.4 beds per 1,000), Mongolia (7.0), Argentina (5.0) and Libya (3.7). In fact, the US ranks 69th out of 182 countries analyzed by the World Health Organization. This lack of hospital beds is forcing doctors across the country to ration care under Covid-19, pushing up the number of preventable deaths. America’s numbers are similarly unimpressive when it comes to medical doctors. The United States has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people, placing it behind Trinidad & Tobago (2.7), and Russia (4.0 doctors per 1,000, for a country that is described as being “in transition”). Life expectancies at birth are lower in the US than they are in Chile or China. The US has a higher maternal mortality rate than Iran or Saudi Arabia.”

Mona Chalabi (1987) British data journalist

Coronavirus is revealing how broken America’s economy really is, 6 April 2020

Death , Country , People , Health

“I’m afraid I’m not very good at Latin, said the superintendent. On the other hand I sometimes think about arithmetic; and in particular about one number – the number One. But I will admit that it is also the most incomprehensible number in the world. Beyond this particular dimension I know only one thing which is supernatural, even though it may well be the reality that affects mortal men most deeply; and that is Time. And when one comes to think about this strange place I was telling you about, the world that is only One, and its connection with the only supernatural thing we know, Time, then everything ceases to be higher or lower than anything else, larger or smaller.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Time , Thinking , Reality , World

“Going to Bits. This phrase me to day and is indeed the one I have been looking for; not tragic, not mortal disintegration; only a central weakness which prevents me from concentrating or settling down I have so wanted to write and write ahead. The phrase "obligatory creation" has haunted me. I have so wanted to get out of my morning bath promptly: have decided to do so beforehand, and have then lain in it as usual and watched myself not getting out. It looks as if there is a physical as well as a moral break in the orders I send out. I have plenty of interesting thoughts but keep losing them like the post cards I have written, or like my cap. I can't clear anything up yet interrupt a 'good read' in order to clear up. I hope tomorrow to copy out a piece of someone else's prose: it is the best device known to me for taking one out of inself, Plunge into anothers minutiae.'”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

31-1-61

p. 224
Commonplace Book (1985)

Hope , Reading

“The Fear of Death often proves Mortal, and sets People on Methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 25 (29 March 1711)
The Spectator (1711–1714)

Fear , Death , People

“I stick to the view I have always held that Hitler missed the bus in September 1938. He could have dealt France and ourselves a terrible, perhaps a mortal, blow then. The opportunity will not recur.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Hilda Chamberlain (30 December 1939), quoted in Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler. British Politics and British Policy. 1933-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 355
Prime Minister

“Our home, a pale blue dot
in the vastness of universe's untouched beauty,
a tiny, spherical world,
afloat in a immensity of space and time.
Here for a moment,
and then we're leaving for the eternity.
In the school of mortality
we learn to acrobat over the abyss.”

alexis karpouzos

mystic poetry and spirituality

School , Home , Time , Beauty

“Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
Life has given nothing to mortals without great labor.”

Horace book Satires

Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)
Original: (la) Nil sine magno
vita labore dedit mortalibus.

Book I, satire ix, line 59

Life

“It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out of hospital would lead us to expect. The knowledge of this fact first induced me to examine into the influence exercised by hospital construction on the duration and death-rate of cases received into the wards; and it led me to lay before the Social Science Association a paper reprinted with the present title. Since the publication of the first edition of that paper, great advances have been made in the adoption of sound principles of hospital construction; and there are already a number of examples of new hospitals realizing all, or nearly all, the conditions required for the successful treatment of the sick and maimed poor.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Notes on Hospitals 3rd Edition (1863), Preface

Success , Knowledge , Exercises , Science

“In my Brain are studies & Chambers fill'd with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life;”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Letters Of William Blake https://archive.org/details/lettersofwilliam002199mbp (1956), p. 50
1790s

Painting , Study , Books , Age

“Vital spark of heav'nly flame!
Quit, oh quit, this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling'ring, flying,
Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Stanza 1
Source: The Dying Christian to His Soul (1712)

Pain , Hope , Flying

“(On Mortality) I don’t think about it. Like I said, I know what I signed up for. What happens, it was meant for my life. God got me, man. God got me.”

Frank Gore (1983) American football running back

Life , God , Thinking

“According to tradition, the Blessed One preordained the Bodhisattva Maitreya as his successor. “And the Blessed One said to Ananda, ‘I am not the first Buddha who has come upon Earth, nor shall I be the last. In due time another Buddha will arise in the world, a Holy One, a supremely enlightened One, endowed with wisdom in conduct, embracing the Universe, an incomparable leader of men, a ruler of devas and mortals. He will reveal to you the same eternal truths, that I have taught you. He will establish his Law, glorious in its origin, glorious at the climax, and glorious at the goal, in the spirit and in the letter. He will proclaim a righteous life, wholly perfect and pure, such as I now proclaim. His disciples will number many thousands while mine number many hundreds.’ “Ananda said, ‘How shall we know him?’ “The Blessed One said, ‘He will be known as Maitreya!’ ”  (Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha) The future Buddha, Maitreya, as his name indicates, is the Buddha of compassion and love. This Bodhisattva, according to the power of his qualities, is often called Ajita—the Invincible.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

Source: Foundations of Buddhism (1930)

Time , Law , Future , Perfection

“We are the earth his word must sow like wheat
And, if it finds no earth, it cannot grow.
We are his earth, the mortal and the dying,
Led by no star — the sullen and the slut,
The thief, the selfish man, the barren woman,
Who have betrayed him once and will betray him,
Forget his words, be great a moment's space
Under the strokes of chance,
And then sink back into our small affairs.
And yet, unless we go, his message fails.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Innkeeper's wife
Source: A Child is Born (1942)

Selfishness , Chance , Star , Forgetting

“The greatest degree of power which occult science can bestow is to be derived from knowledge of the unity and interaction between the Macrocosm and the microcosm, the Universe and man. “The mystery of the earthly and mortal man is after the mystery of the supernal and immortal One”, wrote Eliphas Levi. Lao Tzu also expresses this truth in his words: “The Universe is a man on a large scale.””

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

The Hidden Wisdom In The Holy Bible (1963), Volume III

Universe , Truth , Science , Knowledge

“Magic is an instrument of divine goodness or demoniac pride, but it is the annihilation of earthly joys and the pleasures of mortal life.”

Eliphas Levi (1810–1875) French writer

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians
Source: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magi Part I: The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic By Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant), Translated by A. E. Waite, England, Rider & Company, England, 1896, p. 53

Pleasure , Joy , Life

“Driving down child mortality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in no way a single project, but it can be seen as a unified human accomplishment—maybe even our greatest human achievement, at least for pediatricians and parents.”

Perri Klass (1958) American pediatrician and writer

[Introduction, A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future, https://books.google.com/books?id=fNjVDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=unified&f=false, 13 October 2020, W. W. Norton, 978-0-393-61000-0] (ebook)

Parent , Way

“I am not the first Buddha who came upon Earth, nor shall I be the last. In due time, another Buddha will arise in the world - a Holy One, a supremely enlightened One, endowed with wisdom in conduct, auspicious, knowing the universe, an incomparable leader of men, a master of angels and mortals.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Universe , World , Time , Wisdom

“One of the effects, among others, of modern science has been that of mortally wounding religion by posing in concrete terms problems which esoterism alone can resolve and which remain unresolved because esoterism is not heeded and is heeded less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy, and this obliges it to falsify its own perspective imperceptibly and disavow itself more and more; its doctrine is certainly not affected, but false opinions borrowed from its repudiators corrode it insidiously "from within", as witnessed by modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling of the liturgy, Teilhardian Darwinism or the "sacred art" of surrealist and "abstract" persuasion.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2006, Light on the Ancient Worlds, World Wisdom, 27, 978-0-941532-72-3]
Miscellaneous, Religion

Falseness , Problem , Science , Religion

“Nothing mortals make lasts; nothing the gods make endures forever.”

Megan Whalen Turner The Queen of Attolia

An unnamed goddess
The Queen of Attolia (2000)

God

“All the Good of mortals is mortal.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XCVIII: On the Fickleness of Fortune

“Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.”

Robert Sheckley book Mindswap

Marvin nodded. “Yet this ineffable and ungraspable quantity,” he replied, “this time which no man may possess, is in truth our only possession.”
Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 24 (p. 110)

Time , Memory

“We are one with the angels, even though you claim that you are just a mere mortal.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Angels

“Closed between mortal things
(Even the starry sky will end)
Why do I crave God?”

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970) poet and writer from Italy

Dannazione (Damnation) (29 June 1916). Architecture: from time of mind to time of nature https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/techne/article/view/9757
Original: (it) Chiuso fra cose mortali
(Anche il cielo stellato finirà)
Perché bramo Dio?

God

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100 percent mortality. So you can't live your life in fear.”

Richard Pyle (1967) American ichthyologist

Source: A dive into the reef's Twilight Zone https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_pyle_a_dive_into_the_reef_s_twilight_zone (February 2004)

Life , Fear , Disease

“Dur home, a pale blue dot in the vastness of univers s untouched heauty. a tiny, spherical World, afloat in a immensity of space and time. Here for amoment. and then we're leaving for the eternity. In the school of mortality we learn to accobat over the abyss. Alexis karpouzos”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://gr.pinterest.com/pin/688628599258307225/

School , Home , Time , Learning

“Everything may exist for a short while—even justice. But the true state of the universe is anarchy. It is the mortal’s tragedy that he can never accept this.”

Michael Moorcock book The Knight of the Swords

Source: Book 3, Chapter 6 “The God Feasters” (p. 139), Corum, The Knight of the Swords (1971)

Justice , Universe

“Round the birth of "Pickwick" broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of Dickens.... He turned people into mortal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into immortal jokes.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 4 : "The Pickwick Papers"

Life , People , Birth

“She is a mortal danger to all men. She is beautiful without knowing it, and possesses charms that she’s not even aware of. She is like a trap set by nature - a sweet perfumed rose in whose petals Cupid lurks in ambush! Anyone who has seen her smile has known perfection. She instills grace in every common thing and divinity in every careless gesture. Venus in her shell was never so lovely, and Diana in the forest never so graceful as my Lady when she strides through Paris!”

Edmond Rostand (1868–1918) French writer

Source: Cyrano de Bergerac

Perfection , Nature , Love , Men

“The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

'Greased piglet' Boris Johnson could pass deal says David Cameron https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/17/greased-piglet-boris-johnson-could-pass-deal-says-david-cameron Guardian (17 October 2019}
2010s, 2019

People

Quotes about mortality page 9

Quotes about mortality
page 9