14 Quotes About Time, Life and Death

We should live in the here and now, say many. As a former president of Uruguay put it, life only gets shorter. An actress called time “priceless.  Your time is limited, said the founder of Apple. In fact, Steve Jobs thought a lot about time; he’s quoted twice in the list below of contemplations from great minds about how to live and learn in that short span between birth and death.

1. “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

– William Shakespeare

 

2.
“The years teach much which the days never knew.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

3. “When you buy something, you’re not paying money for it. You’re paying with the hours of your life you had to spend earning that money. The difference is that life is one thing money can’t buy. Life only gets shorter, and it is pitiful to waste one’s life and freedom that way.”

– José Mujica, former president of Uruguay

 

5. “Your time is limited. Don’t waste it by living someone else’s life.”

–Steve Jobs

6. “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”

-Steve Jobs (again)

4. “It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.”

– George Harrison

 

7. “Time, which is so often an enemy in life, can also become our ally if we see how a pale moment can lead to a glowing moment, and then turn to a moment of perfect transparency, before dropping again to a moment of everyday simplicity.”

– Peter Brooks

8. “We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon by illusion and put to death by reality.”

-Judy Garland

 

9. “You’re only here for a short visit. Don’t hurry, don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.”

– Walter Hagen

 

10. “When we live fully in the present, when we acknowledge that death is always with us and not just there at the moment when we breathe our last breath, we are not devastated by events over which we have no control.”

-bell hooks

 

11. “Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”

– Omar Khayyam

12. “This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful experiences.”

– Rudyard Kipling

13. “To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment.”

– Stephen Levine

14. “The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

– Jack London