transience of human life Quotes

A celebration of insignificance, Is that all we are in the end? And one day I’ll just be one more of those faces, frozen in death and wonder

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. 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. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.

Ah, race of mortal men, How as a thing of nought I count ye, though ye live; For who is there of men That more of blessing knows, Than just a little while To seem to prosper well, And, having seemed, to fall?

How fragile life was, how fleeting their days on earth, and how fickle was Death, claiming the young as often as the old, the healthy as often as the ailing, cruelly stealing away a baby's first breath, a mother's fading heartbeat.

Isn't man but a blossom taken by wind, and only the mountains and the sea and the stars and this land of the gods everlasting?

Mortals. I envy you. You think you can change things. Stop the universe. Undo what was done long before you came along. You are such beautiful creatures.

Death is the great wrecking ball that destroys everything. Everything that we have done, everything that we are doing now, and all our plans for the future are completely and irrevocably destroyed when we die. Only teenagers live in that state of temporary insanity when they believe themselves immune from death.

Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave.

I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

Our days on earth are like a shadow, and the time of our affliction is the length of our days.

Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny.

Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.

Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.