House of Cards US TV - Star Trek: The Next Generation TV - William Shakespeare - Edward Young - Ernest Hemingway - Christopher Pike - Ptolemy - Denis Diderot - Will Self - Simon Schama - Anne Carson -
You have to respect your own mortality, Doug. House of Cards US s3e1: Chapter 27, Netflix 2015
We are just as mortal as you are; we’re just as powerless to prevent the inevitable. Star Trek: The Next Generation s3e4: Who Watches the Watchers? Picard to alien bird
Lord, what fools these mortals be! William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream III ii 115, Robin to Oberon
... for from this instant
There’s nothing serious in mortality.
All is but toys. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth II iii 91-93, Macbeth
All men think all men mortal, but themselves. Edward Young, Night Thoughts 1742-5
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, A Farewell to Arms
Krishna was once asked what was the most miraculous thing in all creation, and he replied, ‘That a man should wake each morning and believe deep in his heart that he will live forever, even though he knows that he is doomed.’ Christopher Pike, Phantom
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia. Ptolemy
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, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals ... What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained. Denis Diderot
With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality – threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we’ve begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena. Will Self
We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality. Simon Schama
Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it’s dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth –
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld’s a blank
and all the rest just fantasy. Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides