Freya Stark Quotes

Death is always a reality, and life is incredibly short.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

We can do all we wish while we live; afterward, we are less than the meanest.

We are mortals, we will die one day.

Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.

The world's a bubble, and the life of man, Less than a span.

Life is short for those who are truly able to understand that one day the entire world will come to a complete end. Not everyone is capable of that. Not everyone has the ability to comprehend what going away for all eternity really implies. There are too many distractions, hour by hour, minute by minute, to hinder such an understanding.

Life is but a day at most.

I used to believe I was going to live forever. And then you suddenly become aware that you're not.

You only live a short time... and you are dead a long time.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are fugitives from death.

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.

Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.

Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.

Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.

Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.

In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.