Memento Mori Quotes

“Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Funerals are for the living. If we have not done for the dead while they were yet in flesh, it is too late; let the matter pass at the grave. Day by day we should live for those who are to die; and live so that we may die for those who are to live. Funerals are for the living.”
― Roelif Coe Brinkerhoff

“Sauver quelque chose du temps où l'on ne sera plus jamais.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji'un,
Telah meninggal dunia ibu, oma, nenek kami tercinta....

Requiescat in pace et in amore,
Telah dipanggil ke rumah Bapa di surga, anak, cucu kami terkasih....

Dalam sehari, Bunda menerima dua kabar (duka cita / suka cita) sekaligus. Apakah kesedihan serupa cucuran air hujan yang jatuh dan mengusik keheningan kolam? Apakah kebahagiaan seperti sebuah syair yang mesti dipertanyakan mengapa ia digubah? Bagaimana kita mesti menjawab pertanyaan tentang kematian orang orang terdekat? Mengapa mereka pergi? Kemana mereka akan pergi?

Memento mori, serupa nyala api dan ngengat yang terbakar. Seperti juga lilin yang padam, bunga yang layu, ranting yang kering, pohon yang meranggas. Mereka hanyalah sebuah pertanda, bahwa semua yang hidup pasti akan mati. Agar kita senantiasa teringat pada tempus fugit, bahwa waktu yang berlalu  tak akan pernah kembali. Ketika Bunda masih muda, sesungguhnya Bunda sudah tidak lagi muda, tak akan pernah bertambah muda, tak akan kembali muda. Waktu telah merenggut kemudaan kita pelan pelan. Ketuaan adalah sebuah keniscayaan, dan kematian adalah sebuah kepastian.

Tak ada sesuatu pun yang abadi, Anakku. Ingatan tentang mati semestinya memberi kita pelajaran berharga. Jangan pernah menyia nyiakan waktu. Jangan hilang niat untuk bangkit dari ranjang. Jangan terlalu malas untuk bekerja. Jangan terlalu letih untuk menuntaskan hari. Jangan pernah lupa untuk berdoa. Jangan lalai untuk bersyukur. Jadikan hari ini sebagai milikmu. Ketika semua perkara seakan menggiring langkahmu pada kesulitan, kegagalan, ketidakpastian dan rasa sakit. Pikirkanlah siapa yang akan jadi malaikat pelindung dan penolongmu? Bagaimana engkau akan menemukan eudaimonia? Bagaimana engkau hendak memaknai hidup?

Dalam sekejap mata hidup bisa berubah. Waktu berlalu dan ia tak akan pernah kembali. Gunakan kesempatan untuk bercermin pada permukaan air yang jernih. Tatap langsung kedalaman telaga yang balik menatap kepada dirimu. Abaikan rasa sakit dan penderitaan, sebab puncak gunung sudah membayang di depan mata dan terbit matahari akan menghangatkan kalbumu. Cuma dirimu yang punya kendali atas pikiran, hasrat dan nafsu, perasaan dan kesadaran inderawi, persepsi, naluri dan semua tindakanmu sendiri.

Ketika kita mengingat kematian, kita tidak akan lagi merasa gentar. Sebab ia lembut, ia tak lagi menakutkan. Ia justru menuntaskan segala rasa sakit dan penderitaan. Ia pengejawantahan waktu yang berharga, kecantikan yang abadi, indahnya rasa syukur, dan kemuliaan di balik setiap ucapan terima kasih. Ia mengajarkan kita bagaimana menghargai kehidupan yang sesungguhnya. Ia membimbing kita menemukan pintu takdir kita sendiri.

Apapun perubahan yang menghampiri dirimu. Ia adalah pintu rahasia yang menjanjikan kejutan yang tak akan pernah kamu sangka sangka. Yang terbaik adalah menerimanya sebagai berkat. Apa yang ada dalam dirimu adalah kekuatanmu. Engkau akan membuatnya berarti. Bagi mereka yang paham, takdir dan kematian adalah sebuah karunia, seperti juga kehidupan. Sesungguhnyalah kita ini milik Allah dan kepada-Nyalah kita akan kembali.”
― Titon Rahmawan

“In the world of the living, one must live.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow

“So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with patience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child's emergence from its mother's womb; that's how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“...the fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a very ancient human activity.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“The roses have all gone; "Goodbye," we say, we must;
And I shall leave the busy world one day; I must.
My little room, my books, my love, my sips of wine,
All these are dear to me, they'll pass away, they must.”
― Jahan Malek Khatun, The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women

“But here's the thing: you already have a terminal diagnosis--we all do...every person is born with a death sentence; each second that passes by is one you'll never get back.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

“In developed countries, we have less to fear from infectious parasites, but much more to fear from infectious memes. So, instead of opening our bodies to ambient germs, we open our minds to ambient culture, to determine if we can stay sane throughout the onslaught.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Every day someone wakes up not knowing it is their last day on earth; nobody promises tomorrow.”
― Allene vanOirschot

“Memento Mori.

Remember that you will die.”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Earth and Blood

“…that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we'll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that all things will end, which is something we're apt to forget when we look around us in spring or summer.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Homo sapiens are the most impressive creatures alive (at least on Earth), but also the one to whom life is the most cruel since this animal species is both mortal and conscious of being mortal. Moreover, death is blind; it strikes the just and the unjust without discrimination.”
― Romain Gagnon, SO MAN CREATED GOD IN HIS OWN IMAGE: The Science of Happiness

“The human must show maturity and find meaning in life, knowing that he can no longer count on eternal life other than by the legacy he leaves to future generations.”
― Romain Gagnon, SO MAN CREATED GOD IN HIS OWN IMAGE: The Science of Happiness

“Those who have lost loved ones to situations from which their bodies could not be recovered often suffer from prolonged periods of grief. When we view our dead, sit with them, and talk with them, we set a foundation upon which our grief, our neural recalibration, can be moored.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Memento mori.”
― Caesar's Praetorian Guard

“The presence of gods has been enormously comforting as we have continued to dutifully cross the stage of life, going about or daily tasks, yet knowing that Pale Death was waiting in the wings.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“To have been accompanied on life's journey by the symbolic and monumental props of the gods has been a continuing and reassuring source of solitude. Such props quiet the inner voices that whisper about the inevitable end of life's drama.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lenghts to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them. The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of morality.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“Contemplation, normally regarded as a private pursuit, needs communal support. We are most likely to risk its vulnerabilities and be faithful to its implications when we are embedded in a community that both invokes and witnesses our truth, a rare form of community in which we learn to be alone together, to support one another on a solitary journey. We practice being present to others without being invasive or evasive, neither trying to fix them with advice nor turning away when they share something distressing. Imagine yourself sitting by the bedside of a dying person, who is making the most solitary journey of all. Here, we must lose both the arrogance that makes us think we can fix the other, and the cowardice that tempts us to turn away. Since we are all dying all the time, why not practice this way of relating before the final hour?”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again

“I am never able to forget the possibility of block. Paradoxically, it drives my writing—compelling me to put aside everything else because of the possibility that today may be the last day I will ever be able to write. It’s another way writer’s block is sometimes not the opposite of hypergraphia but the cause. Perhaps writers could reclaim the concept of block as Saint Jerome in his study used a memento mori (a skull, or an hourglass with the sands of time slipping away) to drive his work, in those lovely Renaissance paintings”
― Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“De la vasta suma de las miserias del hombre, más o menos una tercera parte, diría yo, es miseria ineludible. Ese es el precio que hemos de pagar por ser encarnados, por heredar unos genes que están sujetos a deletéreas mutaciones. Es el peaje que nos cobra la naturaleza por el privilegio de vivir en la superficie de un planeta cuyo suelo es en su mayor parte infértil, cuyos climas son caprichosos e inclementes, entre cuyos habitantes se cuenta un número elevadísimo de microorganismos capaces de causar en el hombre, en sus animales domésticos y en sus plantas cultivadas, una inmensa variedad de enfermedades mortales o debilitadoras. A estos misterios de origen cósmico hay que añadir un grupo más numeroso, como es el de los desastres en el fondo evitables que nosotros mismos provocamos, a pesar de ser sus víctimas.”
― Aldous Huxley, Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience

“Remember that you will die, and enjoy every pleasure the world has to offer. Remember that you will die, and none of this illegal shit will matter anyway. Remember that you will die, so who cares how many people suffer from your actions?”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Earth and Blood

“It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world--oh, woe is me!--and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Pocket Editions) by Charles Dickens (7-Oct-2014) Leather Bound

“Incidentally, do you ever think of your own death?

For a while now it’s been a daily companion of mine.

Why is that?

I’m over seventy years old and the thread of life I have left on the reel isn’t long. I’m not going to live another seventy, and I’m starting to consider the fact that I have to leave everything behind. But I take it as something that’s normal. I’m not sad. It makes me want to be fair with everyone always, to sign the final flourish. Mind you, it’s never occurred to me to make a will. But death is in my thoughts every day.”
― Sergio Rubín, Pope Francis: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio: His Life in His Own Words

“The diagnosis is terminal for all of us. A death sentence has been decreed. Each second, probability is eating away at the chances that we’ll be alive tomorrow; something is coming and you’ll never be able to stop it. Be ready for when that day comes.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

“Death resists all comparison and simile. This is something I learned in my first year at Rassambur. To say death is like a land beyond the sea or like an endless scream is to miss the point. Death is not like anything. There is no craft analogous to Ananshael’s work. The truest response to his mystery and majesty is silence. On the other hand, to remain silent is to encourage the fantasies of the uninitiate— skulls brimming with blood, graveyard orgies, infants dangling like impractical chandeliers from the ceilings of candlelit caverns— and so maybe an imperfect analogy is better than none at all. Take a grape. The purple skin is muted, as if by mist or fog. Polish it, or not, then pop it into your mouth. The flesh is firm beneath the cool smooth skin. If you find yourself becoming aroused, stop. Start your imagining over. The grape is a grape. Imagine it properly, or this will not work. Now. What does the grape taste like? A grape tastes like a grape? Of course not. Until you bite the grape, it has no taste. It might as well be a stone lifted from the cold current of some river in autumn: a smooth, chill orb, reticent, flavorless. You could hold it trapped between your palate and tongue forever, with only the faintest hint of juice at the tiny breech where it was plucked from the stem. You are like that grape— plump with slick, rich sweetness, with wet purple life. The truth of life is the grape's truth: only when jaws bite down, when the skin splits, when the sun-cold flesh explodes onto the tongue does it matter. Without the moment of its own destruction, the grape is just a smooth, colorful stone. Without the foreknowledge of the woman who holds it in her hand, her anticipation, before it even passes her lips, of the mangled skin and the sweet life draining over the tongue, the grape would hold no savor…
We are not stones. Our human skin is thin, the life inside us bright. And death? The god I serve? He is the jaw locked around us, the promise of a sweet purple destruction without which we would be no more than so much polished rock.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“if you live much of your life without being sensitive to your own demise, you can also become complacent to the point of allowing your life to pass by.”
― Thomas Lu, The Personal Sustainability Handbook: 60+ Practices to Sustainabilize Your Health, Finances, Relationships and Beyond