Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Mortality
“O Charidas, what of the underworld?”
“Great darkness.”
“And what of the resurrection?”
“A lie.”
“And Pluto?”
“A fable; we perish utterly.”
Callimachus. Trans. by Macnail in Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology. See also Callimachus—Epigrams. XIV. L. 3. Anthologia Palatina. VII. 524.
To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
Fuller—Holy and Profane States. Bk. IV. The Court Lady.
That flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.
Herbert—The Temple. 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.
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. St. 7.
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.
Young—Night Thoughts. Night I. L. 417.