Marcus Aurelius Quotes

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death

Just as a line drawn on water with a stick will quickly vanish and will not last long; even so, brahmins, is human life like a line drawn on water. It is short, limited, and brief; it is full of suffering. One should do good and live a pure life; for none who is born can escape death.

We like lists because we don't want to die.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.

When the race is ended, and the play is either won or lost, and ye are in the utmost circle and border of time, and shall put your foot within the march of eternity, all the good things of your short nightdream shall seem to you like ashes of a blaze of thorns or straw.

Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind.

Lives are mere blips on the canvas of eternity.

Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?

While as he yet doth breath extend, no man is blest; behold the end.

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

Life is short and we have scarcely begun to live when we are called to die.

Life-and-death. Lifedeath. One event. One short event. Don't forget.

The greatest surprise in life to me is the brevity of life.

Life's a short trip. You'll find out.

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.

We are nothing. - Tomorrow we may be die. We are nothing. - You and me.

A celebration of insignificance, Is that all we are in the end? And one day I’ll just be one more of those faces, frozen in death and wonder

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?