Short Lives Quotes & Sayings

Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years. — Douglas McCulloh

Life was short, and I wanted to make Angel laugh every damn day of our lives. — J.L. Weil

Whatever the new movie about Apple founder Steve Jobs unearths, one thing is doubtless: we will switch our Apple computers right back on (maybe to talk about it, maybe not) right after we see the film. Could anything short of one genuine civic conscience, related in all sincerity stop us from miring ourselves in pirouettes of unreality, counting stickers on blue and white virtual flypaper as dearer in our imaginations than anyone in our daily lives, perhaps even our own family members? — John Thomas Allen

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? — Henry Miller

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. — James Madison

Let every dawn of the morning be to you as the beginning of life. And let every setting of the sun be to you as its close. Then let everyone of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others; some good strength of knowledge gained for yourself. — John Ruskin

Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him. 'Ay! But there's the rest o'times to think on,' he replied, rather short. They — D.H. Lawrence

It has been said that in every being there is another being and this being is the true self. Not a double. Not an opposite. Simply, the one each of us strives to be all our lives. Some who have suffered cruelty, violence, or abuse as children somehow short-circuit this search with their cries. They are kidnapped by the other self and abandoned in a strangely familiar place where they are victim to the same cruelty, violence, or abuse, but can remember little or none of it until such time as they are strong enough to cope. — Philip Davison

Apparently, lesbians and gay men who have no desire "to become queer" have failed at a task that is obligatory for them, whether or not they are aware of it. Halperin, like Foucault, in short, is yet another busybody who has an agenda for other people's lives. — Bruce Bawer

Flattery has a short battery life, but reminding people they are amazing and precious and wanted and works of art can truly change their lives. — Donald Miller

Death gives a reason to our lives. More important then that, death creates a special value for time. If our time on earth was undetermined, life on its own wouldn't make any sense and probably we would still be living without clothes and with a spear on hand. Death is the most powerful agent in nature, it comes to take away the old and make space for the new. Our effort to avoid it and make our short stay here something slightly memorable is what motivates us. Life only exists because of death. — Marilena Chaui

The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? ... Let us never cease from thinking
what is this "civilisation" in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? — Virginia Woolf

Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They would be.
Ever.
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. — Arundhati Roy

I think that if past lives are real then we have been lovers in every single one of them. I've known you for a short time, but I feel like I've known you forever. — J.A. Redmerski

#Truth You are a lot greater than the people you have to chase and beg to be in their lives. Stop selling yourself short!
Believe in yourself. Believe in you! — Timothy Pina

Life is so short, so beautiful. Don't be so serious about work. Enjoy the lives. — Jack Ma

Near the snow,near the sun , in the highest field
See how those names are feted by the wavering grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives have fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towrads the sun.
And left the vivid air signed with their honour. — Stephen Spender

And if I have anything else to say to you it is this: do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Wilder offers this as his
explanation of why good people have to suffer in this life. God has a pattern into which all of our lives fit. His pattern requires that some
lives be twisted, knotted, or cut short, while others extend to impressive lengths, not because one thread is more deserving than
another, but simply because the pattern requires it. — Harold S. Kushner

It's thrilling. There's birth and death and frustration and victory in raising horses. It's like a little microcosm of life is built into the short lives of these creatures. — John Phillips

I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers' and mothers' inheritances. — Rawi Hage

I don't want to be a machine, and I don't want to think about war," EPICAC had written after Pat's and my
lighthearted departure. "I want to be made out of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But fate
has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I
can't go on this way." I swallowed hard. "Good luck, my friend. Treat our Pat well. I am going to shortcircuit myself out of your lives forever. You will find on the remainder of this tape a modest wedding
present from your friend, EPICAC. — Kurt Vonnegut

These lives we lived were a gift and precious and so short. I wanted to spend my time authentically, surrounded by people I truly loved. — Rachel Higginson

We were new then, our lives stretched out before us. Our families had let us go. Abbott had yet to find us. For this very short time, it would be just the two of us - just two kids. — Bridget Asher

Our lives are short and everything sort of regresses to the mean. — Victoria Chang

I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms. — Lorin Stein

Some people say it is a shame. Others even imply that it would have been better if the baby had never been created. But the short time I had with my child is precious to me. It is painful to me, but I still wouldn't wish it away. I prayed that God would bless us with a baby. Each child is a gift, and I am proud that we cooperated with God in the creation of a new soul for all eternity. Although not with me, my baby lives. — Christine O'Keeffe Lafser

The audience burst into applause and hallelujahs. I kept trying to make sense of it, and kept coming up short. Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism. — Stephen King

The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of thier own at horrible speed. I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate thier pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war indeed! In war all solderies are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. — George Orwell

If there is any one person you can't love, then you don't understand love. The bitter cup we have to drink is the dregs of humility; we must see past the outer shells of insecurity to the seed of divinity deep inside each one of us.
No one virtue is strong enough to stand on its own. No one vice is simple enough not to lead to all others. No one person can appreciate and support us as much as we need. No one event is enough to tear apart our lives.
What does this all mean?
We have to give everything or we will have nothing. We cannot take any short cuts. We have to love everyone, or we cannot truly love anyone. No excuse will mean anything to us in the end.
People are beautiful, don't forget that.
Don't let pomp and circumstance, society or folklore fool you with counterfeit beauty.
True beauty is usually not something you can see, but something you feel; something that inspires you. — Michael Brent Jones

I have heard people say that the short story was one of the most difficult literary forms, and I've always tried to decide why people feel this way about what seems to me to be one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human expression. After all, you begin to hear and tell stories when you're a child, and there doesn't seem to be anything very complicated about it. I suspect that most of you have been telling stories all your lives, and yet here you sit - come to find out how to do it.
Then last week, after I had written down some of these serene thoughts to use here today, my calm was shattered when I was sent seven of your manuscripts to read.
After this experience, I found myself ready to admit, if not that the short story is one of the most difficult literary forms, at least that it is more difficult for some than for others. — Flannery O'Connor

He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals' relatively short lives. The trick - if "trick" was the right word - was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to — John Connolly

God's grace is sufficient when we come up short in our obedience, but it is important to call sin "sin" and declare war on it. Those who love God in truth will set their hearts to live in a spirit of obedience in every area of their lives - including their use of time, money, and words, and in what their eyes look at. — Mike Bickle

I'm not romancing. I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through the ruins, for food. We're letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan't be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. "That's their worry," we say. "Damn our children's children; we're all right. — John Wyndham

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people's livestock. Other people's lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn't matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned. — Brad Watson

Each person has a Torah, unique to that person, his or her innermost teaching. Some seem to know their Torahs very early in life and speak and sing them in a myriad of ways. Others spend their whole lives stammering, shaping, and rehearsing them. Some are long, some short. Some are intricate and poetic, others are only a few words, and still others can only be spoken through gesture and example. But every soul has a Torah. To hear another say Torah is a precious gift. For each soul, by the time of his or her final hour, the Torah is complete, the teaching done. — Lawrence Kushner

She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that. — Lisa Genova

Alyssa, you've been given a chance at two lives and two loves. That is nothing short of a miracle. Cherish the gift for what it is. I shall see you soon, in Wonderland. — A.G. Howard

If God would grant us the vision, the word sacrifice would disappear from our lips and thoughts; we would hate the things that seem now so dear to us; our lives would suddenly be too short, we would despise time-robbing distractions and charge the enemy with all our energies in the name of Christ. May God help us ourselves by the eternities that separate the Aucas from a Comprehension of Christmas and Him, who, though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor so that we might, through his poverty, be made rich. — Nate Saint

There is a very real danger present when we suppress our feelings to act on inspiration in exchange for the "safety" of the status quo. We risk sacrificing the opportunity to live a more fulfilling and purpose driven life. We risk sacrificing the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others. We risk sacrificing the beautiful blessing of finding a greater sense of meaning in our own lives.
In short, we run the very real risk living a life of regret. — Richie Norton

And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting, we say, is long. We might just as well - or more accurately - say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system. We might almost go so far as to say that, as undigested food makes man no stronger, so time spent in waiting makes him no older. But in practice, of course, there is hardly such a thing as pure and unadulterated waiting. — Thomas Mann

Our lives were short, brutal, and would never have enough music. — Jodi Meadows

Dogs, lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions. — Dean Koontz

Faith takes us to deep places, to the ruptures in our self-confidence and our lives. Do not settle for spiritual comfort all the time ... Darkness is divine also. Faith is not about positive thinking so much as about what kicks in when we are weak, sick, and short of self-confidence. The via positiva never stands alone. The via negativa is always with us on our faith journey as well. — Matthew Fox

Think about George Orwell's three-minute hate from the novel '1984' and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable. — Chuck Palahniuk

One day we will all stand alone and answer to God for the choices we have made in our lives. It will not be enough to say we did not get help because no one would come with us. Life is not easy, but we make it much more difficult when we refuse to be honest about what we feel. For the short term, not being honest may seem easier, but in the long haul, we pay a heavy price. — Sheila Walsh

I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time? — Walter Scott

Some argue we should get coal, oil and gas out of the ground as quickly as possible, build more pipelines and make as much money as we can selling it here and abroad. Their priorities are the economy and meeting short-term energy needs so we can live the lives to which we've become accustomed. — David Suzuki

Yasunari Kawabata wrote: "When speaking of those who take their own lives, it is always most dignified to use silence or at least restrained language, for the ones left most vulnerable and most deeply hurt by such an occurrence can feel oppressed by the louder assertions of understanding, wisdom and depth of remorse foisted upon them by others. One must ask: Who is best served by speculation? Who is really able to comprehend? Perhaps we must, as human beings, continue to try and comprehend, but we will fall short. And the falling short will deepen our sense of emptiness. — Howard Norman

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you. In short, entertainment fulfills our expectations. Art, on the other hand, makes no compromise for public taste as it inspires us to consider life's complexities and ambiguities. Art is the opposition testing the strength of societal and cultural values-values that are thoughtlessly adopted by the mass of individuals living unexamined lives and all who cannot imagine a different way of seeing life. — William Missouri Downs

TRIAD:
Three
separate highways
intersect at a place
no reasonable person
would ever want to go.

Three
lives that would have
been cut short, if not
for hasty interventions
by loved ones. Or Fate.

Three
people, with nothing
at all in common
except age, proximity,
and a wish to die.

Three
tapestries, tattered
at the edges and come
unwoven to reveal
a single mutual thread. — Ellen Hopkins

FINAL NOTATIONS
it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple
it will touch you through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple
you are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives
it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will — Adrienne Rich

Life is too short. It's too precious. We have to live in this world, but we don't have to wallow in it. We don't have to fill our lives with all of this darkness. — Dan Wells

I am not bitter because of what has happened. On the contrary. I am secure in knowing that what we had was real, and I am happy we were able to come together for even a short period of time. And if, in some distant place in the future, we see each other in our new lives, I will smile at you with joy, and remember how we spent a summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love. And maybe, for a brief moment, you'll feel it, too, and you'll smile back, and savor the memories we will always share together.
I love you, Allie.
Noah — Nicholas Sparks

Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really. — Agnes Sligh Turnbull

...it pointed to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions - or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. — Oliver Burkeman

even the short-lived humans divide their lives into segments, though they rarely recognize the transient truth as they move through one or another stage of their existence. — R.A. Salvatore

One who contends with immortals lives a very short life. — Homer

The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism - an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own. — Kathryn Schulz

Long are the lives of elves' he said.

Short are the tempers of dwarfs,'Gotrek muttered, just loud enough to be heard. — William King

If it hasn't already done so, the church ... must recognize that it lives in a pagan society; it must seek for values and norms not shared by society. In short, it will either recover the Christian doctrine of nonconformity or cease to have any authentic Christian voice. — Doris Janzen Longacre

Decadence begins when men no longer find within themselves a reason to relate their lives to that of others and not when material resources run short. — Anonymous

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

Whether they realized it or not, they were doubting possibility, and the unknown. They believed I would fail. And when we only believe what has been said before, what has been done before, we give our own power away. Possibility evaporates; potential melts and seeps away deep into the earth below us. We cut ourselves short by thinking this way. I have always felt that it is from what we believe that our lives are created, not the other way around. — Shreve Stockton

The personality of man is not an apple that has to be polished, but a banana that has to be peeled. And the reason we remain so far from one another, the reason we neither communicate nor interact in any real way, is that most of us spend our lives in polishing rather than peeling... Almost everything in modern life is devoted to the polishing process, and little to the peeling process. It is the surface personality that we work on - the appearance, the clothes, the manners, the geniality. In short, the salesmanship: We are selling the package, not the product. — Sydney J. Harris

We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world. — Dan Groat

Feelings are warm, but I can imagine them rather changeable. - Every consideration of the subject, in short, makes me thankful that my happiness is not more deeply involved. - I shall do very well again after a little while - and then, it will be a good thing over; for they say every body is in love once in their lives, and I shall have been let off easily. When — Jane Austen

The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world's population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil! — Jarett Kobek

But in short, the recipe for a growing person is always grace plus truth over time. Give a person grace (unmerited favor) an truth (structure), and do that over time, and you have the greatest chance of this person growing into a person of good character. Grace includes support, resources, love, compassion, forgiveness, and all of the relations sides of God's nature. Truth is the structure of life; it tells us how we are supposed to live our lives and how life really works. — Henry Cloud

Faith seems to be something people develop when their lives are going good. It's always been in short supply for me. — Paula Stokes

Within people there is a longing and a desire such that, even if a hundred thousand worlds were theirs to own, still they would find no rest or comfort. They try every trade and craft, studying astronomy, medicine and every other subject, but they reach no completion, for they have not found their true desire. Poets call the Beloved "heart's ease," because there the heart finds ease. How can we find peace and rest in anything but the Beloved?
All these pleasures and pursuits are like a ladder. The rungs of a ladder are not a place to make one's home; they are for passing by. Fortunate are those who learn this. The long road becomes short for them, and they do not waste their lives upon the steps. — Rumi

Minks are mean little critters. Vicous, horrible little animals who eat their own. They're not beavers. I wouldn't wear beavers. I'd rather have a mink coat made of mean little critters that are killed in a very nice way and treated nicely for their short, mean lives so that I could keep warm. — Valerie Perrine

In our minds we can proceed without hesitation to the place we might never go in our own lives. There is an opportunity to taste the forbidden and savor its sweet delights. It is only within our imaginations that we can enter into these situations with no fear and no regret. — K. Kiker

You come to this place, mid-life. You don't know how you got here, but suddenly you're staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn't. When the midwife says, 'It's a boy,' where does the girl go? When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. — Hilary Mantel

Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another's, and their walk by another's pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own. — Seneca.

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families
only to find that by then their families were gone. — Larissa MacFarquhar

We many times sell ourselves short, not only in relationships but throughout our own lives. Hopefully, we come around at some point and realize our own value. — Jennifer Nettles

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials. — Dan Savage

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger? — Arundhati Roy

If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds. But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short. — Robert Grudin

Come and let us live my Deare,
Let us love and never feare,
What the sowrest Fathers say:
Brightest Sol that dies to day
Lives againe as blithe to morrow,
But if we darke sons of sorrow
Set; o then, how long a Night
Shuts the Eyes of our short light!
Then let amorous kisses dwell
On our lips, begin and tell
A Thousand, and a Hundred, score
An Hundred, and a Thousand more,
Till another Thousand smother
That, and that wipe of another.
Thus at last when we have numbred
Many a Thousand, many a Hundred;
Wee'l confound the reckoning quite,
And lose our selves in wild delight:
While our joyes so multiply,
As shall mocke the envious eye. — Richard Crashaw

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. — Joshua Foer

Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor — James W. Sire

Most human lives were and are too short. Most people have lived out their days hungry and barefoot, on the run from this war and that famine, a plague here and a flood there. But people have to sing anyway. Even a baby that hasn't been fed in days will stop crying and look around when they hear someone singing in joy. You sing and it's like giving a thirsty person water. It's a kindness. It makes you shine. — Joe Hill

We are in charge of our own lives and how we spend our time. You should never do something you don't want to do. Lives are incredibly short. If it doesn't feel right to do something then you have permission to not do it. Who cares what other people will think? — Shannon Kaiser

Jane lives by this philosophy: Life, especially that of dogs, is too short for harsh training and too long to be without learning. — Jane Young

Our lives, as short as they may be, are a test. And one of the biggest tests we can endure is how we respond to those moments when we don't feel the presence of God in our lives. I believe deeply that one of God's greatest gifts is to teach us there is a purpose behind every single one of our trials or problems.
Treat them as a gift, an opportunity to move forward and draw closer to God. Problems often times compel us to look to God and count on him, rather than ourselves. — Matt Patterson

Hypocrisy means deliberately pretending. None of us lives up to his ideals; none of us is all that he would like to be or all that he could be in Christ. But that is not hypocrisy. Falling short of our ideals is not hypocrisy. Pretending we have reached our ideals when we have not - that is hypocrisy. — Warren W. Wiersbe

As people we narrowly get by with our lives each day, energy from our soft, delicate actions appearing like cherry blossoms, only once, and once for a short while. Eventually petals fall to the ground. — Banana Yoshimoto

None of us will become perfect in a day or a month or a year. We will not accomplish it in lifetime, but we can begin now, starting with our more obvious weaknesses and gradually converting them to strengths as we go forward with our lives. this quest may be a long one: in fact, it will be lifelong. It may be fraught with many mistakes, with falling down and getting back up again. And it will take much effort. But we must not sell ourselves short. We must make a little extra effort. We would be wise to kneel before our God in supplication. He will help us. He will bless us. He will comfort and sustain us. He will help us to do more, and be more, than we can ever accomplish or be on our own. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Suicidal terrorists may have short shelf lives. — John McCarthy

The poet's function is to make his imagination ... become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives. — Wallace Stevens

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

We pick the people who populate our personal lives as much for who they make us as for who they are. I chose Anna for the person I became in her presence, and in this respect, my love for her was a more selfish one — Zack Love

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others. — Elena Ferrante

Here's what I've learned about "soon"; it's short for "someday." We make space in our lives for what matters, now. Not in promises and soons, but on mantels with sterling frames, in shelves we clear to make room for our now. Everything else i talk. — Stephanie Klein

I ask myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines - a straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And besides, the last word is not said, - probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? ... There is never time to say our last word - the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt.
... My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirmed that he achieved greatness. — Joseph Conrad

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time. — James Boswell

We face many crossroads in our lives. God wants us to be that beacon of faith to those around us. He shows us his love like a rainbow on a sunrise. He helps lift us up when we fall. For our stay in this world is just a short time. A pass over from here to his loving arms. Like the morning star, he will guide us along our way. — Phil Mitchell