George Chapman Quotes

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

The seed of mortals broods o'er passing things, and hath nought surer than the smoke-cloud's shadow.

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

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams...

I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.

How odd to watch a mortal kindle / Then to dwindle day by day / Knowing their bright souls are tinder / And the wind will have its way

We are but phantoms ... and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights.

There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream is man, no more.

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

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.

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

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

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.

For mortal kind taketh thought only for the day, and hath no more surety than the shadow of smoke.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

All who are born are always dying.

The essence of what makes life beautiful is the fact that it can go away.