Life’s short span forbids us to enter on far-reaching hopes. Horace, Odes
Drop the question what tomorrow may bring, and count as profit every day that Fate allows you. ibid.
That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day, ‘I have lived’: tomorrow let the Father fill the sky with a black cloud or clear sunshine. ibid.
The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads – Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good. Baruch Spinoza
A little while and I will be gone from among you. Whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indians chief, attributed
To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour. William Blake
Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go … Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset. H Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines 1886
The brevity of our life, the dullness of our senses, the torpor of our indifference, the futility of our occupation, suffer us to know but little: and that little is soon shaken and then torn from the mind by that traitor to learning, that hostile and faithless stepmother to memory, oblivion. John of Salisbury c.1115-80
It seems to me you lived your life
Like a Candle in the Wind. Elton John and Bernie Taupin, 1973 song
Enlarge my life with multitude of days,
In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays;
Hides from himself his state and shuns to know,
That life protracted is protracted woe.
Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy. Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes
Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, prince of Abyssinia. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed. ibid.