Marcus Aurelius Quotes

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

People will forget me pretty quick.

I don't care much whether people remember me or not. If people remember, well and good. If they don't remember, it's alright - I'm dead anyway.

I could still be forgotten when I'm dead. I don't really care what happens when I'm dead.

Every time I wake, I understand how easy it is to be nothing.

It is the lot of man to suffer; it is also his fortune to forget. Oblivion and sorrow share our being, as darkness and light divide the course of time.

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Time erases both the best and the worst of us.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

Time quickly puts an end to artificial and accidental fame

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

How soon will time cover all things.