Freya Stark Quotes

There are some people who don't want to deal with the fact that we are not forever. Some people decide to live life to the fullest.

it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.

Man wants but little, nor that little long; How soon must he resign his very dust, Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!

O the world is but a word; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone!

Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other---and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.

The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

Our life's a moment and less than a moment, but even this mite nature has mockingly humored with some appearance of a longer span.

No one is guaranteed their next moment, or their next breath; yet, humanity has a habit of thinking of its existence on the earth as eternal. Those who are rooted and grounded in Christ know that life is just a vapor.

We've spent the last few millennia aware that senescence is horrible but knowing nevertheless that it's inevitable. We've had to find some mechanism to put it out of our minds so we can get on with our miserably short lives.

O what is life, if we must hold it thus as wind-blown sparks hold momentary fire?

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

I believe we all must face the fact of death. It is both gift and curse.

The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it's kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing.

Time is numbered only to man.

Nobody lives forever and I've had a blessed life.

We pass through this world but once.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.