Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

We are comfortable with the fact that we cannot know personally what happened in the world before we were born, yet we are uncomfortable with the notion that we will stop engaging with time at some point in the future.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go.

Life begins when a person first realizes how soon it will end.

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.

The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.

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

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

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

Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

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.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

We're here for such a short period of time.

We pass through this world but once.

Our time on Earth is so random.

I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much - if at all.

It's ironic that in our culture everyone's biggest complaint is about not having enough time; yet nothing terrifies us more than the thought of eternity.

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

The longer I live, the more I am enabled to realize that I have but one life to live on Earth, and that this one life is but a brief life, for sowing, in comparison with eternity, for reaping.

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

Time is long but life is short.

I think all people are familiar with thinking about their death and trying to come to terms with the fact that we will, at some point, no longer exist. The loss of one's ego is very tough to reconcile with; you really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to wrap your head around the idea of just not existing anymore.