William Temple Quotes

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

At the end of the day, we came into the world naked, and that's the way we're going to go.

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.

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

How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

Mortality defines the human condition.

You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.

This planet Earth, the act of putting a roof over our heads, our flesh and blood existence, it's all very temporary.

I realise how precious life is, probably because I've seen how it can be taken away.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

I now know that things I always thought I could depend on can crash in an instant. Because of the love that I have been shown, I now know what it means to be 'beloved.' I now know that no breath is to be taken for granted.

I remember one time watching a bird snatch a dragonfly out of midair and thinking, 'Gee, life can come to an end - crunch! - just like that.'

Life is so fragile.

A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.

Man is like the foam of the sea, that floats upon the surface of the water. When the wind blows, it vanishes, as if it had never been. Thus are our lives blown away by Death.

One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.

You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.

Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support. Life and death are connected by vulnerability. The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives. Let's not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life during the times we are powerful, successful, and popular.