Thomas Gray Quotes

I used to ski across the vast white expanses of a quiet and lonely mountaintop. In the stillness and solitude... I pondered the mysteries of the universe, the planet, nature and of man. I'm still pondering.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are fugitives from death.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth.

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

And so, irritants, it is with this that I leave you. You are spared so that you can think of what it really is to live in a world that engenders a pain for which there is no comfort. Here is your product! You have the rest of your lives to think of this. And I suggest you think quickly, for a long life is never a guarantee.

This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

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

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.

How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?

People are born soft and weak. They die hard and stiff.

What a piece of work is a man

There isn't any way to libel the human race.

It is death that is the guide of our life, and our life has no goal but death.

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

It is better to spend one day contemplating the birth and death of all things than a hundred years never contemplating beginnings and endings.