Abraham Cahan Quotes

This world's a bubble.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

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

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

We are but phantoms ... and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights.

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.

In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

We're just a bubble in a boiling pot.

A human being is only breath and shadow.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Alas for the affairs of men! When they are fortunate you might compare them to a shadow; and if they are unfortunate, a wet sponge with one dash wipes the picture away.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

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

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

Our time on Earth is so random.

The present will not long endure.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

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

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.