Existential Urgency Quotes

Die before you die, there is no chance after.

Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully--wild, generous, drastic--in an unrationed profligacy of self ... And in that split second when you understand that you finally are about to die-to uncreate the world no time to do it over no more chances--that instant when you realize your conscious existence is truly flaring nova, won't you want to have used up all-all-the splendor that you are?

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain.

If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

We all must live our lives always feeling, always thinking the moment has arrived.