Stephen Spender Quotes

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.

The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.

Death does determine life.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

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.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Truly life is wasted on the living.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave.

Life is nothing unless death has been faced down.

If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

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

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

To live is to die.