William Alexander Quotes

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.

Consider when thou art much vexed or grieved, that man's life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead.

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

Just as a line drawn on water with a stick will quickly vanish and will not last long; even so, brahmins, is human life like a line drawn on water. It is short, limited, and brief; it is full of suffering. One should do good and live a pure life; for none who is born can escape death.

The end of all is death and man's life passeth away suddenly as a shadow.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.

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.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

How many together with whom I came into the world are already gone out of it.

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.

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.

Rien n'est plus parfait, plus acheve qu'un cadavre. Nothing is more perfect, more complete than a corpse.

We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life, which in the end we leave, only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness.

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, 'Let no one be called happy till his death;' to which I would add, 'Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.'

We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion.

I don't want him to live forever, and I know that he's not going to live forever whether I want him to or not.

Live mindful of how brief your life is.

One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.