Life's Passage Quotes

All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.

Life does not wait: Whether we spend our lives meaningfully or not, the time will be used up moment by moment.

It sometimes seems that we live as if we wonder when life is going to begin. It isn't always clear just what we are waiting for, but some of us sometimes persist in waiting so long that life slips by - finding us still waiting for something that has been going on all the time. . . . This is the life in which the work of this life is to be done. Today is as much a part of eternity as any day a thousand years ago or as will be any day a thousand years hence. This is it, whether we are thrilled or disappointed, busy or bored! This is life, and it is passing.

You know, it's a long world.

Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

As for me, I'm just passin' through this planet.

The important thing in life is to let the years carry us along.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.

And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.

life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

We're all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

Life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

I don't understand at best, I cannot speak for all the rest. But you may find a lifetime's passed you by. Every dog has its day, every day has its way Of being forgotten.

So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.

The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright.

Whoever you are, motion and reflection are especially for you, The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.