Stewart Brand Quotes

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

After I was 70, I realized that, 'Okay, I would like to have another 50 years, and I probably could.' But part of me is saying, 'Maybe I'm not going to have that much time.'

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.

Tomorrow doesn't really exist.

We are an episode between two oblivions.

Today's today. Tomorrow we may be ourselves gone down the drain of Eternity.

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight-behind the veil of glittering constellations.

Be glad you're even alive.' Be furious you're going to die.

Remember that even if you were to live for three thousand years, or thirty thousand, you could not lose any other life than the one you have, and there will be no other life after it. So the longest and the shortest lives are the same. The present moment is shared by all living creatures, but the time that is past is gone forever. No one can lose the past or the future, for if they don't belong to you, how can they be taken from you?

So what I tend to do is to think of today as the past. It's funny when you comin in first but you hope that you last.. You just hope that it lasts.

I was born into a world that was already dying; I belong to it.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.

What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?

People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

All of us have been dying, hour by hour, since the moment we were born. Realizing this, let all things be placed in their proper perspective. . . . Remember, it is always later than you think.

We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

People live for the morrow, because the day-after-to-morrow is doubtful.

What's to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty; Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Enlarge my life with multitude of days, In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays; Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, That life protracted is protracted woe. Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy.

I'm being made aware of my mortality all the time.