Mortality — Philosophical Quotes
Rilke wrote that death weeps in the midst of us while we think ourselves alive. Mann turned a sanatorium into a seven-hundred-page meditation on what it means to have a body that will stop working. Camus argued that the awareness of death is what gives rebellion its urgency. Kierkegaard called despair a sickness unto death and meant something worse than dying. The thinkers here do not flinch from the fact that we end. They ask what that knowledge does to us while we are still here, and whether facing it honestly changes how we live.
Voices
Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard, Rollo May, Václav Havel
Related Concepts
meaning, absurd, authenticity
Quotes (7)
- “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling ...” — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
- “Death is large. We are in his realm, laughing. When we think ourselves in the...” — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
- “What was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving insta...” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- “Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore...” — Albert Camus, The Rebel
- “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
- “Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ah...” — Rollo May, The Courage to Create
- “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certain...” — Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace