Literary notes about mortality (AI summary)
The term "mortality" in literature is employed with remarkable versatility, serving both as a concrete measure of death and as a profound metaphor for the human condition. Authors use it to underscore the transient nature of life and to invite reflection on our fragile, finite existences [1, 2, 3]. At times, it appears in discussions that blend the empirical with the philosophical, such as when addressing statistical aspects of death, like the bills of mortality and epidemic impacts [4, 5, 6, 7]. In other contexts, writers deploy "mortality" more poetically to evoke the bittersweet beauty of life and the inescapable presence of decay in both nature and society [8, 9, 10]. This multifaceted use underscores how "mortality" remains a resonant and enduring theme across diverse literary traditions.
- Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time, for from this instant There's nothing serious in mortality.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare - one fixed end Of life abideth for mortality; Death's not to shun,
— from On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus - The increase in wealth and in the consumption of goods, and the diminution of the mortality rate.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - The usual number of burials within the bills of mortality for a week was from about 240 or thereabouts to 300.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe - Statistics show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - —Mortality in the Philippines in these years of conquest was frightfully high.
— from A History of the Philippines by David P. Barrows - But all the sweet odors of the night could not take from the room a faint suggestion of mortality.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner - 'Why, then, ye children of mortality, seek ye from without that happiness whose seat is only within us?
— from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius - And yet in those days not much more than now Would generations of mortality Leave the sweet light of fading life behind.
— from On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus
