Robert Kagan Quotes

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

I hate Sridevi. I hate her for making me realise that she, too, is finally only just a human being. I hate that her heart, too, has to beat to live.

I'm no rose. I have been around a while, and you never know when something is going to be the last thing you do.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

What I've been thinking about recently is the idea of finite and fragility. Either we're acknowledging that our lives here are finite, this moment is finite, and that this whole world is fragile, or we're not, but it is really happening and that is really true.

That which prematurely arrives at perfection soon perishes.

We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

Five years after Aerosmith got back together, I realized how fragile we are as humans. There was a time I thought we were bulletproof, but then things happened and I came to the realization that I had to play every gig as if it was my last show. You have to start thinking that way, because you never know what's going to happen next.

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

I think you just have to accept the fact that no one lives forever, and eventually things are going to come to an end, whether it's a TV show or life.

When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.

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

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

I have always been very obsessed with time. Time's passage makes us all very vulnerable and because we all experience it in our own way, it can make us feel very alone.

Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.

Even Castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.

A human being is only breath and shadow.

This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over.

Become dust - and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone - and they will throw thee on glass.

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

Mortality defines the human condition.