Andrew Marvell Quotes

How vainly men themselves amaze, / To win the palm, the oak, or bays; / And their incessant labours see / Crowned from some single herb or tree.

What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

I've been to MTV and all of that worldly stuff. It's death. It's meaningless.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

O human beauty, what a dream art thou, that we should cast our life and hopes away on thee!

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

Oh, how swiftly the glory of the world passes away!

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

My own idea is that these things are as piffle before the wind.

Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.

If you live for this world, you are in the junk business. It's all just premature junk.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

All the windy ways of men Are but dust that rises up, And is lightly laid again.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

Oh, Vanity of vanities! How wayward the decrees of Fate are; How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are!

Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

Remember that life holds out many pleasing deceits to us by the vanity of glory; for that when we are beginning to live, then we are dying. There is, therefore, nothing more profitless than ambition.

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.