Lewis Black Quotes

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

We're just a bubble in a boiling pot.

A human being is only breath and shadow.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

Calvin: Today for show and tell, I've brought a tiny miracle of nature: a single snowflake! I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water just like every other one when you bring it into the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I will be leaving you drips and going outside.

Little fly, thy summer's play My thoughtless hand has brushed away. Am not I a fly like thee? Or art not thou a man like me? For I dance and drink and sing, Till some blind hand shall brush my wing!

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.

One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.

Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

How odd to watch a mortal kindle / Then to dwindle day by day / Knowing their bright souls are tinder / And the wind will have its way

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

The sparrow still falls.

Everything you gather is just one that you can lose.

I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.

What do we have in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew lies on its body?

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Every time someone in your life dies, you realize you're not invincible and you have to wonder if we're celebrating life or if we're mourning a death.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

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

How little we have, I thought, between us and the waiting cold, the mystery, death--a strip of beach, a hill, a few walls of wood or stone, a little fire--and tomorrow's sun, rising and warming us, tomorrow's hope of peace and better weather . . . What if tomorrow vanished in the storm? What if time stood still? And yesterday--if once we lost our way, blundered in the storm--would we find yesterday again ahead of us, where we had thought tomorrow's sun would rise?

With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future... all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty.

All in all is all we are.