Francis Quarles Quotes

Consider in what condition both in body and soul a man should be when he is overtaken by death; and consider the shortness of life, the boundless abyss of time past and future, the feebleness of all matter.

Mortality defines the human condition.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

Man is like the foam of the sea, that floats upon the surface of the water. When the wind blows, it vanishes, as if it had never been. Thus are our lives blown away by Death.

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

I am a man. And I am former baby and a future skeleton, and I am a distant future pile of dust.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.

How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

Men come and men go, I have come and I will go when my time comes

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

Man appears for a little while to laugh and weep, to work and play, and then to go to make room for those who shall follow him in the never-ending cycle.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

We're here for such a short period of time.

We're all dying. We're all in the process of oxidizing. Everyone of us is in the process of oxidizing, so to sort of interrupt one aspect of that while everything else goes on, it's a freak show.

Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly; to every day we live, a day we die.

We pass through this world but once.