Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.

Life is a winking light in the darkness.

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams...

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.

Our time on Earth is so random.

I see the state of all of us who live, nothing more than phantoms or a weightless shadow.

The worldly stuff is not always going to be there and it could be taken away at any moment.

I think we all lose in the end because we don't get to stay here forever.

For mortal kind taketh thought only for the day, and hath no more surety than the shadow of smoke.

And lo, between the sundawn and the sun His day's work and his night's work are undone: And lo, between the nightfall and the light, He is not, and none knoweth of such an one.

The seed of mortals broods o'er passing things, and hath nought surer than the smoke-cloud's shadow.

Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind.

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

We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water.

To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.

In life, and in sports, we all know that nothing lasts forever.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

We like to think of life as a constant ... Yet it can be ended in a heartbeat.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

Everything is transient. Everything is constantly changing. The only thing we have is now.