John Sterling Quotes

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

As for me, I'm just passin' through this planet.

Men are the dreams of a shadow.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

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

Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

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

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly.

Who am I? Not the body, because it is decaying; not the mind, because the brain will decay with the body; not the personality, nor the emotions, for these also will vanish with death.

I think that laughter and death are closely related: comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death. It's probably linked with the fact that we are the only animals who know we must die.

At the end of the day, we came into the world naked, and that's the way we're going to go.

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

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.

We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water.

There's no victory-condition for being human.

Who hail thee, Man! the pilgrim of the day, spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay.

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

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

The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die.

This life at best is but an inn, And we the passengers.