Remember: Matter: how tiny your share of it. Time: how brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate: how small a role you play in it.
The part of life which we really live is short.
Life is short, if we are only said to live when we enjoy ourselves; and if we were merely to count up the hours we spent agreeably, a great number of years would hardly make up a life of a few months.
And a man's life's no more than to say "One."
The very life which we enjoy is short. [Lat., Vita ipsa qua fruimur brevis est.]
I think the life we are living now is just a blink in the eye of eternity.
Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.
Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.
... we each have our fleeting hour.
The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.
Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.
Because in a split second, it's gone.
We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever. It's only a flash and we waste it. We waste it with our anxiety, our worries, our concerns, our burdens.
Faith, sir, we are here today, and gone tomorrow.
We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let's do some dreaming. Have yourself a very good Sunday, my dear readers.
On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.
For even if the allotted space of life be short, it is long enough in which to live honorably and well.
When in the evening we are alone with our most existential thoughts, it is then that we come face to face with the most precious truths that we discover in our brief existence in this world. Just before fatigue envelopes us, taking us into sleep. We think of what our lives actually mean. And then we know how lucky we are if we still enjoy consciousness, rationality and love. But the greatest of these is love.
How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.
Of how many women might the history be comprised in those few words - 'she lived, suffered, and was buried'!
Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.
Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale
Life is short and we have scarcely begun to live when we are called to die.
