A Quote by Juvenal
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.
Related Quotes
The short bloom of our brief and narrow life flies fast away. While we are calling for flowers and wine and women, old age is upon us.
The short bloom of our brief and narrow life flies fast away. While we are calling for flowers and wine and women, old age is upon us.
[Lat., Festinat enim decurrere velox
Flosculus angustae miseraeque brevissima vitae
Portico; dum bibimus dum sera unguenta puellas
Poscimus obrepit non intellecta senectus.]
The noiseless foot of Tune steals swiftly by
And ere we dream of manhood, age is nigh.
The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour Is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, Perfumes, and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived.
What art thou, life, that we, must court thy stay?
A breath one single gasp must puff away!
A short-lived flower, that with the day must fade!
A fleeting vapor, and an empty shade!
A stream that silently but swiftly glides
To meet eternity's immeasured tides!
A being, lost alike by pain or joy?
A fly can kill it, or a worm destroy!
Impair'd by labor, and by ease undone,
Commenced in tears, and ended in a groan.
There is in life only one moment and in eternity only one. It is so brief that it is represented by the fleeting of a luminous mote through the thin ray of sunlight - and it is visible but a fraction of a second. The moments that preceded it have been lived, are forgotten and are without value; the moments that have not been lived have no existence and will have no value except in the moment that each shall be lived. While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same.
Let's take the instant by the forward top;
For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees
The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time
Steals ere we can effect them.
The great thing that strikes you on looking back is how quickly you have come-how very brief is the span of life on this earth. The warning that one would give, therefore, is that it is well not to fritter it away on things that don't count in the end; nor on the other hand is it good to take life too seriously as some seem to do. Make it a happy life while you have it. That is where success is possible to every man.
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.
Independent travel does that, bringing temporarily together these wandering ships that would otherwise pass in the night. Relationships were mostly brief and sometimes downright fleeting. The barriers and masks of settled existence melted away, allowing strangers to become fast friends, if only for a day. We travellers needed that, having deliberately stepped away from the social safety net of family, school, work and community.
The Span of Life is too short to be trifled away in unconcerning and unprofitable Matters.
Worry - a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.
Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties... Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.
Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:-- We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf.
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.
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