Thomas Gray Quotes

Everything on earth is a game. A passing thing. We all end up dead. We all end up the same, don't we?

A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

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.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

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

Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.

Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live.

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.

I am a man. And I am former baby and a future skeleton, and I am a distant future pile of dust.

What happens is we're all gonna return to dirt, so at the end of the day we're all equal.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

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

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.

The fascinating thing about human beings is that they don't last, and everything eventuates, and everything is very, very brief. And even if you do manage to look reasonably well as you age, unfortunately you are attacked at every level by illness and so forth. It's a fact of life.

Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!

It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go; that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late.

The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains.