Mikhail Bulgakov Quotes

I always know I can die at any moment.

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

Isn't it strange how we move out lives for another day? Like skipping a beat, what if a great wave should wash us all away?

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

We're all expendable. We think the world's going to stop when a pope dies, or a king. And then... life goes on.

When you've been in life-threatening situations, you become aware that life is not for ever.

When you are young and healthy, it never occurs to you that in a single second your whole life could change.

Mortality defines the human condition.

Life is an incurable disease.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

You're never promised your next breath.

I find life so shocking in general. Everything about it surprises me.

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

There's no sense that you're there forever. No parent is there forever.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

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.

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.

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

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

We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

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

Sometimes the hardest part of my job is the incessant reminder of the fact we're all trying so assiduously to ignore: we are here temporarily. Life is only ours on loan.