Laurence Sterne Quotes

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.

Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

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.

Time flies never to be recalled.

Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?

Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:-- We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf.

Even though in the world you are the most learned scholar of the time, Behold the vanishing of this world and this time!

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.

The years keep coming and going, Men will arise & depart; Only one thing is immortal: The love that is in my heart.

For the short-lived bloom and contracted span of brief and wretched life is fast fleeting away! While we are drinking and calling for garlands, ointments, and women, old age steals swiftly on with noiseless step.

Like water spilt upon the ground--alas, Our little lives flow swiftly on and pass; Yet may they bring rich harvests and green grass!

This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, "This, too, will pass away.

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

Better a life like a falling star, brief bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.