Paul Tsongas Quotes

I realise how precious life is, probably because I've seen how it can be taken away.

We all take life for granted, one way or another.

I had gone through a near-death experience, and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what's important.

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.

We need to appreciate how precious life is.

I hope maybe 'The Returned,' in some small way, can contribute to the argument of the poignancy of human life and make people not take for granted things.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

I'm not afraid of death. What's to fear? Once you're dead, that's it. Nothing. I don't believe in heaven or hell. That's baloney. What matters is the here and now. Yes, I'm 88, and there are things I can't do: I can't run a race or climb Everest. But isn't life magnificent?

Nobody lives forever and I've had a blessed life.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

What makes us really human is it's in the presence of death that we start valuing life.

Life is a precious gift - a gift we often take for granted until it is threatened.

I guess it's about getting older. I know that I'm going to lose people that I love - I'm going to die myself - so everything seems to be getting somehow sweet and more important and more special and more humbling and more challenging and more terrifying all at the same time.

For one thing we may be grateful: this life is not eternal.

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

The thing is to appreciate the fragile wonder of it all, down to the last breath, down to the dying embers of consciousness.

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.