Charles Godfrey Leland Quotes

The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour Is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, Perfumes, and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived.

Life is a frail moth flying Caught in the web of the years that pass.

And what is Life? - An hour-glass on the run

Youth passes like a dream.

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

Time hurries by, we're here and gone.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

Oh, the years fly by, that's just natural.

Consider in what condition both in body and soul a man should be when he is overtaken by death; and consider the shortness of life, the boundless abyss of time past and future, the feebleness of all matter.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.

Alas, Postumus, the fleeting years slip by, nor will piety give any stay to wrinkles and pressing old age and untamable death.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

Life is short but it is wide. This too shall pass.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

But when to-morrow comes, yesterday's morrow will have been already spent: and lo! a fresh morrow will be for ever making away with our years, each just beyond our grasp.

I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing is very permanent.

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.