Quotes & Sayings About Lifespan

A wedding gown entails multilayering of expensive specialty fabrics for an outfit whose useful lifespan may come and go in a single afternoon. Much like a bomb suit. — Mary Roach

The human resource is limited to the duration of his/ her lifespan, while time is unlimited. — Sunday Adelaja

Rachael said, "Do you know what the lifespan of a humanoid robot such as myself is? I've been in existence two years. How long do you calculate I have?"
After a hesitation he said, "About two more years."
"They never could solve that problem. I mean cell replacement. Perpetual or anyhow semi-perpetual renewal. Well, so it goes. — Philip K. Dick

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old. — Charlie Brooker

The Great Culling of the human race already has begun. It is being done through chemicals added to our drinking water, food, medicines, and the air we breathe - chemicals that have the known effect of reducing fertility and shortening lifespan. — G. Edward Griffin

Going meat-free can make a huge difference. Studies show that vegetarians are, on average, 10 to 20 pounds lighter than meat-eaters and that a vegetarian diet reduces our risk of heart disease by 40 percent and adds seven or more years to our lifespan. — Ingrid Newkirk

He looked like he'd see the lifespan of the human race a thousand times, and had swallowed its history of violence, of sadness, of loss. — Quil Carter

to look twenty-nine. The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult lifespan into one long twentysomething ride. Even a new term - amortality - has been coined to describe living the same way, at the same pitch, from our teens until death. This is a contradictory and dangerous message. We are led to believe the twentysomething years don't matter, yet, with the glamorization of and near obsession with the twenties, there is little to remind us that anything else ever will. This causes too many men and women to squander the most transformative years of their adult lives, only to pay the price in decades to come. Our cultural attitude toward the twenties is something like good old American irrational exuberance. Twenty-first-century twentysomethings have grown up alongside the dot-com craze, the supersize years, the housing — Meg Jay

I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. — George Saunders

Death is nature's way of making things continually interesting. Death is the possibility of change. Every individual gets its allotted lifespan, its chance to try something new on the world. But time is called and the molecules which make up leaf and limb, heart and eye are disassembled and redistributed to other tenants. — Peter Steinhart

Corbin wanted, quite simply, to die.
He had wished for death many times over his long lifespan, but never as fervently as he did while Beth Adams rattled off breastfeeding statistics, her baby sucking industriously, mouth fully around the entire areola, as Sam was quick to point out, finger outlining the area in question. Corbin was speechless.
-Corbin at Baby Boot Camp — Erin McCarthy

There's no point in fighting for a woman that is rude and boring, just because she's hot. Such woman shortens your lifespan. — Daniel Marques

How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gildings: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

My brothers, family of our nation, secured Kuwait shall be, and secured you shall all be from every evil and long live Kuwait. And may you all live as her saviors, virtuous sons to her soil, and be her envoys. May she long live, may you long live adhering to her propitious principles, defending her kind and humanitarian lifespan, and her immaculate and tolerant Islamic faith. — Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah

To put it simply--our brain span should match our lifespan. — Meryl Comer

The number of people with HIV receiving Medicare benefits has grown over time, reflecting growth in the size of the of the HIV positive population in the U.S. but also an increased lifespan for people with HIV due to antiretroviral medicines and other treatment advances. — David Mixner

If shortening my lifespan by a year would kill these guys, I'd do it... — Nico Tanigawa

I used to think death might be hidden somewhere on our bodies.
Tucked behind the pupil like a coin, slid beneath the thumb nail, ribbon-wrapped around a wrist bone. A sharp, dark sliver; a loose, pale pellet. Each person different. Each lifespan set. On the day of your death, it melts out through your entire body, a warm, broken bath bead. Until then, it waits-sealed and silent. — Aimee Bender

Interpersonal experience shapes the mind as it continues to develop throughout the lifespan ... Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain's structure and function. — Daniel J. Siegel

Saying that "life is short" is such a cliche. And it's true.
In fact, we only have five minutes to be here. In the really big scheme of things, not even that long. We humans don't even have the lifespan of fruit flies if you look at the bigger picture.
In other words, we don't have a second - not even a second - to waste on petty drama, on living fake, shallow lives, on swallowing our truth, or on hiding our light.
We only dance around the flame of this gorgeous human existence for moments and the one thing important at all is loving beautifully. — Jacob Nordby

Malaria eradication requires a 100% mind-set of success. There are no 70% or 80% or 90% efforts that pass in malaria control and eradication. One single infected mosquito that escapes can go on to bring death to dozens of victims in its lifespan, lay more eggs and restart an outbreak that progresses from a few to dozens to hundreds. — T.K. Naliaka

950 years. After the flood, the lifespan — Craig Hines

It is unlikely that changes in telomeres are influencing the lifespan of the worm. That is because telomeres only shorten when cells divide. Most of the cells of the worm stop dividing when the worm becomes an adult. — Cynthia Kenyon

Try this way of picturing a human lifespan. The National Football League's Dallas Cowboys' stadium holds 105,000 people. Now, imagine that you're watching life go by down on the field, and every day you watch that life go by from a different seat. You don't even get a third of the way around. Before you've settled into a third of the seats, you'd be dead. And, that's if you had a good run, eighty-two-plus years. Yikes! — Bill Nye

The full retirement age is 67 and the lifespan is 80, so when they first conceived Social Security, they didn't think they were going to be paying benefits for 13-15 years. That's one of the reasons why this pyramid scheme isn't working. — Joe Heck

The Yellow River is boundless
flowing east without cease
on and on never clearing
while everyone's lifespan ends
and ifyou would ride the clouds
how will you grow wings
unless while your hair is black
you make an effort moving or still — Han-shan

If lifespan jumps by 30 or 40 years, that has enormous implications. — Joshua Lederberg

Nothing produced can be allowed to maintain a lifespan longer than what can be endured in order to continue cyclical consumption. — Peter Joseph

In 1820, the average lifespan was just 26 years. Twenty-six years! — Peter Diamandis

We also have people dying longer, we are able to keep people alive without much quality of life in many cases. We haven't done a great job of making healthspan match up with lifespan, which is both miserable and unbelievably costly - and frightening. — Ken Dychtwald

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, — Mary Ruefle

As James Lovelock writes, 'Mother Earth' is now an old lady in her sixties, no longer as resilient as she once was. With our conscious actions, we are now measurably shortening her lifespan. — Mark Lynas

In the countryside, secrets have a short lifespan — Ignazio Silone

What is it like to burn as the humans do? When one's existence can be parcelled and measured in the units that the humans use, what was it? Time. Units of time. Ability to calculate, and live through countable units of time in motion. The physicality of time passing, when one's lifespan is short enough to be able to tangibly experience the passage of time. — Teo Yi Han

Television is very much like the motion picture; you need high-end product that will first go on broadcast or cable and eventually on the Internet, and then the lifespan of this content being distributed worldwide. — Michael Eisner

Lifespan extension has never really been a goal of aging science, nor should it. — S. Jay Olshansky

For many months up there he had looked down and considered how the lifespan of a sunflower reflected the lifespan of man: hopeful, beautiful, brightly shooting out of the ground; broad and strong, with a face turned full and dutiful toward the sun; head so heavy with ripe thoughts it bowed toward the ground, turned brown, lost its bright hair, grew weak on its stalk; mowed down for the long winter. — Lauren Groff

In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life planning becomes of special importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind or another are something of an inevitable concomitant of post-traditional social forms. Life plans are the substantial content of the reflexively organised trajectory of the self. Life-planning is a means of preparing a course of future actions mobilised in terms of the self's biography. We may also speak here of the existence of personal calendars or life-plan calendars, in relation to which the personal time of the lifespan is handled. — Anthony Giddens

Korum couldn't understand [Connor's] placidity. If Mia had blushed at the touch of another man, that man's lifespan would've been numbered in minutes. — Anna Zaires

The lifespan of any show is to end in cancellation. — Michael Cudlitz

Reducing caloric intake is the only proven method of extending life. If caloric intake is reduced to 20 percent below maintenance, you can extend your lifespan considerably. — S. Jay Olshansky

Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it. — Neel Burton

The fact is that nothing in gerontology even comes close to fulfilling the promise of dramatically extended lifespan, in spite of bold claims to the contrary that by now should sound familiar. — S. Jay Olshansky

What makes me so certain that the natural human lifespan is far in excess of the actual one is this. Among all my autopsies (and I have performed over 1000), I have never seen a person who died of old age. In fact, I do not think that anyone has ever died of old age yet. We invariably die because one vital part has worn out too early in proportion to the rest of the body. — Hans Selye

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption. — Ibn Khaldun

History uses a unit of measure for time that is different from that of the lifespan of the individual, whereas man is only too ready to measure the evolution of history by his own yardstick. — Gustav Stresemann

It was built way back in the Sixties, and with that long lifespan, that capacity year-in year-out, and the inevitable deaths[6], you would think the dorm was haunted. However, from my own experience, it was only ever haunted by the Ghost of the Half Eaten Pizza From a Week Ago or the Spirit of the Guys Two Doors Down Who Think Towels Under the Door Prevents Everybody From Knowing They're Smoking Pot. Real ghosts would have made the place more interesting. — Dennis Liggio

The prodigy who fades is an old story. But the prodigy who sets a high mark when young and then hits that mark, or exceeds it, over and over again, for a full lifespan, is truly remarkable, and worth celebrating. — John Baird

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short. — Craig Venter

The rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark. — Michael Crichton

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly. — Nicholas Negroponte

The last thing you ever want to do is extend the period of frailty and disability and make people unhealthy for a longer time period. So lifespan extension in and of itself should not be the goal of medicine, nor should it be the goal of public health, nor should it be the goal of aging science. — S. Jay Olshansky

Imagine that: If you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan. — Cynthia Kenyon

We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty. — Muriel Barbery

I would not be at all surprised to find out ... personal feelings about our situation in time, seldom in accordance with fact, so that we are always taken by surprise by 'ageing', may be an indication of a different lifespan, in the past - but that this past, in biological terms, is quite recent, and so we have not come to terms with it psychologically. — Doris Lessing

The actual lifespan of a thought is very short ... unless you believe it, trust it, or take direction from it.. Then it can last a lifetime. Be choosy. Pick the ones with which to do this. — Charles F. Glassman

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter ... will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. — Lewis Strauss

The dream they dream is beautiful. A dream as bold as your own, or bolder. You want to explore and colonize the universe; they wish to extend the lifespan of the universe beyond all boundaries, to remake its laws, and shape reality to banish entropy, decay, and death forever. I'd like to believe in that dream whether it's true or not. — John C. Wright

Dogs have such a limited lifespan to teach us about friendship and loyalty...perhaps they know we have a short span of attention. — Dan Cohen

SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company's lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people. — Elon Musk

[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of science would still have been to increase the average length of life. — G.H. Hardy

Mitochondria, as we have seen, are only passed on in the egg, so all 13 mitochondrial genes come from our mothers. If these genes really do influence lifespan, and we can only inherit them from our mothers, then our own lifespan should reflect that of our mothers but not our fathers. — Nick Lane

Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life.
The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan.
The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying. — Jaimal Yogis

When I'm working in finite serials, I always think in terms of the entire book rather than the individual episode because, by far, the vaster sector of the project's lifespan will be in complete book form rather than the singles. — Warren Ellis

Our physical health is dependent upon energy. We have a short lifespan compared with past Yuga's. We are made up of energy lines. The reason people lived longer is because there was less negative energy in the world. — Frederick Lenz

Money does not buy you freedom. Time does. — J.R. Rim

They say that the average lifespan of an SVU detective is 4 years. People can't do it longer than that because it's so difficult. — Mariska Hargitay

Nobody wants to be born a One. One's have the shortest lifespan. They must turn themselves in to The Protectorate for termination at age twenty-five. If I were ever going to feel sympathy for Darian, it would be because of that. Knowing he'd die the youngest of all the citizens is probably what made Darian go mad. — Shannon Duffy

Anything you adopt temporarily only begets temporary results, and fluctuating your weight up and down is not lifespan favorable. — Joel Fuhrman

And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course. — George Saunders

According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn't count toward your lifespan because you're drinking wine and enjoying yourself. — Svetlana Alexievich

We are like fruitflies, measuring everything in terms of our own lifespan. But since our lifespans are so short, our perspective is entirely wrong.
God, who inhabits eternity, sees things differently. He knows that our lives are just a mist. We should trust Him. It was not that long ago that Jesus came and it will not be that long before He returns. — Douglas Wilson

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. — Nicholas Ostler

I am confident that when I get really old, the human lifespan will be extended. — Jens Voigt

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn't fashionable these days, but it's her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. — Margaret Drabble

The lifespan of human beings is merely a small blip in time. We are temporary visitors on this planet and we should embrace every moment that we are alive. Life is delicate, beautiful and fleeting, make the most of it and never take it for granted. Thank you for reading and be prepared for anything my friends! — Frank Montgomery

It is sometimes argued that disbelief in a fearful and tempting heavenly despotism makes life into something arid and tedious and cynical: a mere existence without any consolation or any awareness of the numinous or the transcendent. What nonsense this is. In the first place, it commits an obvious error. It seems to say that we ought not to believe that we are an evolved animal species with faulty components and a short lifespan for ourselves and our globe, lest the consequences of the belief be unwelcome or discreditable to us. Could anything show more clearly the bad effects of wish-thinking? There can be no serious ethical position based on denial or a refusal to look the facts squarely in the face. But this does not mean that we must stare into the abyss all the time. (Only religion, oddly enough, has ever required that we obsessively do that.) — Christopher Hitchens

they feel ignored, unappreciated, and unloved. That's because their context-blind Aspie family members are so poor at empathic reciprocity. As we have learned, we come to know ourselves in relation to others. This doesn't just apply when children are developing self-esteem. Throughout our lifespan, we continue to weave and re-weave the context of our lives, based on the interactions we have with our friends, coworkers, neighbors and loved ones. This is why it is so important for an NT parent/partner to get feedback from their spouse. A smile, a hug, a kind word, a note of encouragement: These are messages that reinforce the NT's self-esteem and contribute to a healthy reciprocity in the relationship. Without these daily reminders from their loved ones, NTs can develop some odd defense mechanisms. One is to become psychologically invisible to others and even to themselves. — Kathy J. Marshack

The Japanese have a long lifespan in part because they eat different forms of algae. — Homaro Cantu

Before I chose Dauntless ... I felt assured of my long lifespan, if nothing else. Now there are no reassurances except that where I go, I go because I choose to. — Veronica Roth

You can't have it all, all at once. Who - man or woman - has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Books exceed authors' lifespan. — Toba Beta

Ingesting divine cinnabar will make your lifespan inexhaustible. You will last as long as heaven and earth, be able to travel on clouds and ride dragons, and ascend at will to the Heaven of Highest Clarity — Ge Hong

The only way to live several lives in one lifespan is to write stories. — Vishwas Mudagal

I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day. — Earl B. Russell

Growing new organs of the body as they wear out, extending the human lifespan? What's not to like? — Michio Kaku

The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. — Greta Christina

Tech companies have a finite lifespan: For the successful ones, an IPO or exit is never more than a few years off. But by recruiting locally and developing homegrown talent, companies can build something that remains after they're gone. People, skills and a culture of innovation persist. — Ryan Holmes

We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk - always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part - there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it. — Miranda July

I'll never be as old as someone older than me, but I can be older than them if I outlive their lifespan. — Jarod Kintz

But seen through a long lens, peacemaking founded on 'forgetting' appears to have a limited lifespan. — Erna Paris

A person's Acts of #Kindness far outlives their lifespan,for they leave behind a true, meaningful legacy. — Michael Levy

A great tide of civilization governs how humans do things. When that tide goes out, we centralize, establish command and control structures, and attempt to find efficiencies in large batches and long queues. When the water starts to come back in, we break down those structures, start to drive control down into the hands of 'common' folk, and attempt to find efficiencies in the quick decisions that get made by people closest to the problem. The tide is coming back in and will probably continue to ebb that direction for the lifespan of anyone alive at the time of this writing. — Max Guernsey III

The brevity of a human lifespan tormented them as never before, and their hearts soared above the vault of time to join with their descendants and plunge into blood and fire in the icy cold of space, the eventual meeting place for the souls of all soldiers. * — Liu Cixin

A career in entertainment has a lifespan, like one in sport. — Sophie Ellis-Bextor

I have been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). It's a terminal disease with an average lifespan of two to five years post-diagnosis, and scientists don't know what causes it. ALS prevents your brain from talking to your muscles. As a result, muscles die. As a result, every 90 minutes people die. I am a person. — Steve Gleason

What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part - there was no one to blame and no way to reverse — Miranda July

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan. — Christopher Hitchens

The time is coming when man will be able to determine the length of his lifespan by controlling his diet. — Henry Ford

Autobiographical memory: Memory across the lifespan for both specific events and self-related information. — Alan Baddeley