Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.
Creatures of a day, what is any one? What is he not? Man is but a dream of a shadow. Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rest upon men a radiant light and, aye, a gentle life.
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
What, if as said, man is a bubble. [Lat., Quod, ut dictur, si est homo bulla, eo magis senex.]
His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.
The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.
The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst his desires were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.
The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.
We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream is man, no more.
The loves and hours of the life of a man, They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
...small too even the longest fame thereafter, which is itself subject to a succession of little men who quickly die, and have no knowledge of themselves, let alone of those long dead.
