“So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.”

Describing the fear of death as a persistent background to ordinary life · Boswell, Life of Johnson

• Death
• Mortality

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Observing how mortality can strip away distraction and sharpen attention · Boswell, Life of Johnson

• Death
• Mortality

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”

Offering a compact ideal of useful action, courage and contemplation · Lecture series, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

• Beauty
• Mortality
• Truth

“The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”

A characteristically dry observation on the demands of later life · Remark quoted in Time, 1950

• Mortality
• Time

“The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.”

Eliot's sardonic response to receiving literary fame at its highest level · Remark to John Berryman, 1948

• Fame
• Mortality

“All that a person does or thinks is of consequence.”

Giving moral weight to the whole fabric of a life · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Mortality
• Truth

“Only the soul is of itself—all else has reference to what ensues.”

Separating the enduring self from temporary circumstances · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Faith
• Mortality

“Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.”

Warns against postponing life while endlessly preparing for some future moment · Essay, Prudence (1841)

• Mortality
• Time

“I am very thankful for what I can do, and I do not repine at what I can't do; and life flies only too fast.”

Acceptance of physical limitation without surrendering gratitude for life · Letter to Miss Gurney, 5 March 1852

• Hope
• Mortality
• Time

“Life, indeed, ought to be a constant state of preparation for death; but few make it so, and I feel I have not so done.”

A sober acknowledgement of mortality and the difficulty of living with it constantly in mind · Private reflection, 1834

• Death
• Life
• Mortality

“If writing were even an effort to me, I should not now be alive, but must have been absolument epuisée; and it might have been inserted in the bills of mortality—"dead of letter-writing, A. Opie.”

Her memorable joke about the extraordinary volume of her correspondence · Letter to Emily Taylor, 1849

• Art
• Joy
• Mortality

“How I wish I were, what I am not, and fear I never may be, weaned from the pleasures of this life, and given only to preparation for another!”

An unusually candid admission of the tension between earthly happiness and religious aspiration · Journal, 1832

• Faith
• Joy
• Mortality

“Myself a young disciple.”

His modest description of his relationship to the recently deceased poet Ferdinand Freiligrath · Letter to Käthe Freiligrath-Kroeker, 20 March 1876

• Friendship
• Mortality
• Poetry

“I wish we were all in heaven.”

A characteristically mild response to moments of strain and disorder · Conversation, recalled by family and friends

• Faith
• Hope
• Mortality

“It is impossible to be much alone during illness, without thinking often of all that is hidden from us by the veil of life.”

Connecting solitude and physical frailty with thoughts of the unseen and eternal · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Faith
• Mortality
• Solitude

“O how many deaths there are in the world for the affections!”

Treating separation and loss as forms of emotional bereavement · Letter to Joanna Baillie, 12 April 1828

• Friendship
• Love
• Mortality

“The last winter deprived me of my truest and tenderest friend — the mother by whose unwearied spirit of love and hope I was encouraged to bear on through all the obstacles which beset my onward path.”

Remembering her mother as the sustaining presence behind her perseverance · Letter to Joanna Baillie, Rhyllon

• Love
• Memory
• Mortality

“It is a sad reflection—the waste of valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.”

Lamenting how life can squander what matters while preserving what does not · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Despair
• Mortality
• Time

“That the world is for the young is Nature's own decree; if we, who are no longer of that fortunate company, cannot see it, we ought.”

Accepting generational change as a natural condition rather than a grievance · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Mortality
• Nature
• Time

“The sense of tears in me was touched for the clock, and I stooped down to watch it crawling laboriously along in the dust, over a very rough road.”

Finding pathos and fellowship even in the determined journey of a tiny beetle · Mearing Stones, A Clock

• Mortality
• Nature

“There's no pathos of age except where it touches humanity.”

Locating the poignancy of age in human experience rather than mere antiquity · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Mortality
• Time

“Nature is ever economical, and souls are her very dearest commodity.”

A playful reflection on the singular value of individual souls · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1888

• Mortality
• Nature

“This vanity of surviving our dust by lasting monuments of national gratitude, has prompted men to the most noble actions.”

A sharp observation on fame, mortality and the motive power of remembrance · Essay, On the Origin, Nature, and Design of Sculpture

• Fame
• Memory
• Mortality

“Executed in the presence of Omniscience this 14th of April 1770.”

A solemnly comic closing that invokes a divine witness · Last Will and Testament, 14 April 1770

• Faith
• Mortality