Time & mortality quotes, explained

A teacher's influence passes from student to student and generation to generation, so no one can say where it ends.

The first line of Keats's long poem Endymion: beautiful things never lose their power to delight us, and their loveliness grows over time instead of fading.

The melancholy Jaques compares life to a play in seven acts, from baby to old age. It is a witty, gloomy view of life that the play quietly answers.

A skill takes so long to master that one lifetime is barely enough. It is a call to start now and to respect how much there is to learn.

Latin for “seize the day,” or more literally “pluck the day” like ripe fruit. Horace tells a friend to enjoy today instead of worrying about a future no one can know.

Caesar tells his wife that cowards suffer death over and over in their fears, while the brave face it only once. He says it on the morning he is murdered.

Old age is not a decline to dread but the goal that youth was preparing for. Browning's speaker invites a listener to grow old with him because the later years complete the life.

Thoreau explains why he moved to Walden Pond: to strip life down to its essentials and find out what it really has to teach, so that he would not reach death and discover he had not lived.

A wry aside in a letter about the new U.S. Constitution. Franklin made it famous, but the joke was already in print more than seventy years earlier.

Dickens describes the years before the French Revolution as a time of extremes, then adds the sting: it was much like his own day, when people also insisted everything was either the best or the worst.

Shakespeare defines true love as constant: it does not change when circumstances change, and it does not fade with time or age.

Latin for “remember that you must die.” It is a reminder that life is short, meant to make you humble and to push you to spend your days on what matters.

Everything flows and changes, so the river is never the same twice, and neither are you. The popular wording is a later paraphrase of Heraclitus's surviving fragments.

Everyone, king or cobbler, feels something on New Year's Day, because it is the day from which we all count our time and reckon how much is left.

Richard says the winter of the family's unhappiness has been turned into glorious summer by his brother, King Edward IV. The famous half-line is usually quoted as if it meant the opposite.

An hour spent idle is not free. If you could have been earning during that time, the wages you gave up are a real cost, on top of whatever you spent.

Twain's joke when a newspaper wrongly reported he was dying. His real words were drier: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

The poet decides the beloved is better than a summer's day, which is too short and changeable, and promises that the poem itself will keep their beauty alive forever.

The song asks whether old friends should be forgotten, and answers no. “Auld lang syne” means roughly “old long since,” or “the good old days,” and the singers drink a cup of kindness to them.

A prayer to understand how short life is, so that we spend our days wisely.

Latin for “time flees,” the source of the English saying “time flies.” Virgil's fuller line adds that the time lost can never be recovered.

The person we are as children shapes the adult we become. Wordsworth hopes his grown-up self will keep the wonder he felt as a child seeing a rainbow.

Part of Santayana's argument that progress depends on memory. He was writing about how individuals and societies learn, not giving a warning specifically about politics or war.

Hamlet asks whether it is better to live and endure life's suffering or to die and end it, and concludes that fear of what comes after death keeps people going.

Life moves through opposite seasons, birth and death, weeping and laughing, and each has its proper time. The passage is both comforting and a reminder that we do not control the timing.

A traveler picks one of two paths that were “really about the same,” then imagines telling the story years later as if the choice made all the difference. It is a poem about how we tell stories about our choices.

Whatever work is in front of you, give it everything you have, because life is short and there will be no chance to do it later.

The present day is never ordinary. Emerson warns against the illusion that the important moment is always somewhere else, and says today is the critical, decisive day.

Jobs urges graduates to follow their own judgment rather than other people's expectations, because life is short. He spoke from the experience of a recent cancer diagnosis.