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Exlpore more Mortality quotes

"There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?"

"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then-our friends are not able to finish their stories."

"Are-you dying?" she asked."Just can't breathe. This air.""Poor, poor-good lord. I've forgotten your name.""Hell of a thing.""Barney!"He clutched her."No! Don't stop!" She arched her back. Her teeth chattered."I wasn't going to," he said. "Oooaugh!"He laughed."Don't please laugh at me.""Not meant unkindly."A long silence, then. Then, "Oof."

"I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it."

"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing-a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."

"For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."

"After you die, a rare friend or family member may carry your memory throughout life. Most will forget you. As if you were never here."

"You could have died later on, you could have died after peace had been declared. But, in any case, you were going to die."

"Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?"
Explore more quotes by Tom Stoppard


"The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages."


"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."


"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."


"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."


"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon."


"If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes."
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