Quotes & Sayings About Short Life Span

My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey. — Franz Kafka

The Span of Life is too short to be trifled away in unconcerning and unprofitable Matters. — Mary Astell

Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride. — Franz Kafka

Trust me: all of us walk around and look at each other, and without saying it, we all know we're thinking, 'Really dude? Were still here!' and pinch ourselves. Typically, careers have short life span, 10 years if you're lucky, so what we've done is amazing. — Tommy Lee

war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention - an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind - and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don't even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You'll see.
What's more, war is obsolete. Most nations don't make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious "coalition." The earth is small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business. — Ann Jones

It is a melancholy fact that childhood, so short when compared with the average span of life, should exert such a strong and permanent influence on character that no amount of self-training afterwards can ever completely counter it. — Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan

I think it will last," said Grandfather. "In my experience when people once begin to read they go on. They begin because they think they ought to and they go on because they must. Yes. They find it widens life. We're all greed for life, you know, and our short span of existence can't give us all that we hunger for, the time is too short and our capacity not large enough. But in books we experience all life vicariously. — Elizabeth Goudge

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. — Mark Helprin

When it was just you and your fight to live, the only thing that mattered was time. Time was the only thing reminding you to propel forward and find your next meal, the next roof over your head, or those few hours of crucial sleep, because your days were numbered and they wouldn't stop for anyone, no matter how rich, privileged, or smart you were.
If there was one thing I'd learned in my short span of twenty-three years, it was that time didn't discriminate. — Rachael Wade

Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future. This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside. — Erich Fromm

If we give priority to the outer life, our inner life will be dark and scary. We will not know what to do with solitude. We will be deeply uncomfortable with self-examination, and we will have an increasingly short attention span for any kind of reflection. Even more seriously, our lives will lack integrity. Outwardly, we will need to project confidence, spiritual and emotional health and wholeness, while inwardly we may be filled with self-doubts, anxieties, self-pity, and old grudges. — Timothy J. Keller

Really the writer doesn't want success ... He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see. — William Faulkner

For the short-lived bloom and contracted span of brief and wretched life is fast fleeting away! While we are drinking and calling for garlands, ointments, and women, old age steals swiftly on with noiseless step. — Juvenal

In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the surface of your Being. — Eckhart Tolle

Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days. — Ellen DeGeneres

'Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school. — Chris Crutcher

It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it. — Jeremy Northam

A girl's career today doesn't have the same kind of life span, whereas it used to be a collaboration and a partnership and it continued. Peter Lindbergh still uses girls - like, look at Amber Valetta - so there are some photographers that have relationships long-term with models. I also think that the industry can't support the amount of models that exist right now and therefore the relationships between photographers and models and even the clients is short lived. — Michael Flutie

The short span of life forbids us to take on far-reaching hopes. — Horace

My short attention span has allowed me a life of diversity in work and place. — Maira Kalman

The trials of living and the pangs of disease make even the short span of life too long. — Herodotus

The vampire Dimitri calmly looked up at Reese and smiled. "Commander, everything gets easier over time," he answered. "Especially if you have all the time that there is. And I do. As a human, you live such a short span of time that you do not learn that life is a continuous battle with one enemy - and that compromise is the only way to ultimately win. Those that do not understand this and think they can control everything; fall to the death of illusion. — Tony Ruggiero

People seek within a short span of life to satisfy a thousand desires, each of which is insatiable. — Oliver Goldsmith

Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good. — Roger Ebert

For all of us, the time is short and the span of life is brief On top of that, our real human problem, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said in a direct rebuke to the modern illusion, is not just that life is short but that we waste so much of it-so that life ceases for us "just when we are getting ready for it."35
But — Os Guinness

The short span of life forbids us to spin out hope to any length. Soon will night be upon you, and the fabled Shades, and the shadowy Plutonian home. — Horace

Fear is a very explosive emotion, but it has a short life span. It's the sprint. The marathon is hope. — Mike Huckabee