Life is short, God's way of encouraging a bit of focus.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.
~Charles Richards

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite. Or waiting around for Friday night or waiting perhaps for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance. Everyone is just waiting.
~Dr. Seuss

Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.
~Chinese Proverb

Live every day as if it were your last and then some day you'll be right.
~H.H. "Breaker" Morant

Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.
~Wayne Dyer

I have died so little today, friend, forgive me.
~Thomas Lux

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
~Braveheart

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
~Elbert Hubbard

As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.
~Zachary Scott

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
~Annie Dillard

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.
~James Dean

Why always "not yet"? Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?
~Norman Douglas

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
~Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden, 1854

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
~Stephen Vincent Benét

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
~Abraham LincolnvThere is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
~George Santayana, "War Shrines," Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
~Fr. Alfred D'Souza

Time! where didst thou those years interWhich I have seene decease?
~William Habington

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.
~Scottish Proverb

I'm less interested in why we're here. I'm wholly devoted to while we're here.
~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com

To always be intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it - this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed.
~Walter Scott

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.
~John Burroughs

Never forget that you must die; that death will come sooner than you expect... God has written the letters of death upon your hands. In the inside of your hands you will see the letters M.M. It means "Memento Mori" - remember you must die.
~J. Furniss, Tracts for Spiritual Reading

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.
~Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.
~William James

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?
~David Brin

A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he has lost no time.
~Francis Bacon, Essays

You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.
~Charles Buxton

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
~Margaret Fuller

Death twitches my ear. "Live," he says, "I am coming."
~Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), Minor Poems, Copa

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.
~Sydney Smith

Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.
~John Henry Cardinal Newman

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.
~Ruth E. Renkl

You may delay, but time will not.
~Benjamin Franklin

We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves.
~George M. Adams

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
~Bernard Berenson

I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.
~Tagore

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
~Nicolas de Chamfort

I held a moment in my hand, brilliant as a star, fragile as a flower, a tiny sliver of one hour. I dripped it carelessly, Ah! I didn't know, I held opportunity.
~Hazel Lee

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may;
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.

~Robert Herrick

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.
~George MacDonald

Most of us spend our lives as if we had another one in the bank.
~Ben Irwin

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
~Larry McMurtry, Some Can Whistle

When your life flashes before your eyes, make sure you've got plenty to watch.
~Author unknown, from a television commercial

Begin doing what you want to do now. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake.
~Marie Ray

I try to treat each evening and weekend as little slices of retirement because no one is guaranteed a lengthy one at the end of their career.
~Mike Hammar

One can make a day of any size.
~John Muir

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
~Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927

Our time consumes like smoke, and posts away;
Nor can we treasure up a month or day:
The sand within the transitory glass
Doth haste, and so our silent minutes pass.

~Rowland Watkyns

If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.
~Edmund Wilson

The more side roads you stop to explore, the less likely that life will pass you by.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

...Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

~Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" (poem)

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
~Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.
~Arthur Miller, After the Fall, 1964

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
~George Bernard Shaw

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.
~Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle

Time is like the wind
That comes in the morning
With a barely palpable caress of the cheek
Rising to a comfortable caress
In its measured passage of the day
Until it rises a sudden gale
Revealing the irrevocability of its power
Trembling our browning leaves
And blowing them to our finality.

~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
~Jean Cocteau

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.
~Indian Saying

Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear.
~Author Unknown

Each day is an opportunity to travel back into tomorrow's past and change it.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.
~Art Buchwald

If you woke up breathing, congratulations! You have another chance.
~Andrea Boydston

though love be a day and life be nothing, it shall not stop kissing.
~e.e. cummings

There are many To-morrows, my Love, my Love, -There is only one To-day.
~Joaquin Miller

Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
~Russell Baker

Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies - alas! how soon he dies!

~Samuel Johnson

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

To-morrow - oh, 'twill never be,
If we should live a thousand years!
Our time is all to-day, to-day,
The same, though changed; and while it flies
With still small voice the moments say:
"To-day, to-day, be wise, be wise."

~James Montgomery, To-day

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
~Diane Ackerman

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.
~Dion Boucicault

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
~Stephen Levine

Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
~Mark Twain

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Remember you must die whether you sit about moping all day long or whether on feast days you stretch out in a green field, happy with a bottle of Falernian from your innermost cellar.
~Horace

Time wears all his locks before;
Take thy hold upon his forehead;
When he flies, he turns no more,
And behind his scalp is naked.

~Robert Southwell

Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock; for, when it is once past, there is no recalling it.
~Jonathan Swift

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
~William Hazlitt, On the Love of Life, 1815

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
~Jean de La Bruyère

Is there life before death?
~Author Unknown

It's a mere moment in a man's life between an All-Star Game and an Old-timers' Game.
~Vin Scully

Cowards die many times before their deaths;The valiant never taste of death but once.
~William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1600

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
~Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny, 1901, translated by Alfred Sutro

If you could travel back in time to the present moment, what would you do differently?
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

When it comes time to die, make sure all you got to do is die.
~Attributed to Jim Elliot

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.
~Henry James

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
~Samuel Johnson

Every day you are alive is a special occasion. Every minute, every breath, is a gift from God.
~Mary Manin Morrissey

Expect an early death - it will keep you busier.
~Martin H. Fischer

Fields can lie fallow, but we can't; we have less time.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

No! no arresting the vast wheel of time,
That round and round still turns with onward might.

~Charles Cowden Clarke

Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending.
~Author Unknown

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
~Rabindranath Tagore

The question for each man is not what he would do if he had the means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has.
~Hamilton

May you live all the days of your life.
~Jonathan Swift

Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.
~Charles Baudelaire, "Enivrez-vous," Paris Spleen, 1869

Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying.
~Christian Furchtegott Gellert

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
~Samuel Johnson

The swift years slip and slide adown the steep;
The slow years pass; neither will come again.

~William Sharp

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
~Jack London

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Later never exists.
~Author Unknown

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
~Johann von Goethe

If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand.
~Righteous Brothers, "Rock & Roll Heaven"

That it will never come againIs what makes life so sweet.
~Emily Dickinson

Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
~Mark Twain

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
~Allen Saunders, 1957

The value of moments, when cast up, is immense, if well employed; if thrown away, their loss is irrevocable.
~Lord Chesterfield

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity. Waste not the smallest time in imbecile infirmity, for well thou knowest that seconds form eternity.
~E. Knight

Lost time is never found again.
~Benjamin Franklin

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone.
~Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Foxes, 1865

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
~William Shakespeare

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
~Henry David Thoreau

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop to look around once in a while you could miss it.
~From the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Many a man gets weary of clamping down on his rough impulses, which if given occasional release would encourage the living of life with salt in it, in place of dust.
~Henry S. Haskins

Every second is of infinite value.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We are always getting ready to live but never living.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
~George F. Will

We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
~Jean Paul Sartre, Situations, 1939

Time goes, you say? Ah no!Alas, Time stays, we go.
~Henry Austin Dobson

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
~Sydney J. Harris

No man is quick enough to enjoy life to the full.
~Spanish Proverb

How did it get so late so soon?
It's night before it's afternoon.
December is here before it's June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?

~Dr. Seuss

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
~Hector Berlioz

Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life.
~Michael Leboeuf

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
~Joan Baez

The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
~Helen Rowland

Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours should not be numbered by years, days, and hours.
~Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, 1578

You only live once; but if you live it right, once is enough.
~Adam Marshall

Life, if well lived, is long enough.
~Seneca, De Ira

There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
~Jean de la Bruyère

What a folly to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.
~John Howe

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Tis better to buy a small bouquet
And give to your friend this very day,
Than a bushel of roses white and red
To lay on his coffin after he's dead.

~Author Unknown

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.
~Author unknown, sometimes attributed to W.M. Lewis

All the windows of my heart I open to the day.
~John Greenleaf Whittier

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Each day comes bearing its own gifts. Untie the ribbons.
~Ruth Ann Schabacker

Present your family and friends with their eulogies now - they won't be able to hear how much you love them and appreciate them from the grave.
~Anonymous

The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there.
~Monica Baldwin

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
~Japanese Proverb

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.
~Lord Byron

Don't ever save anything for a special occasion. Being alive is the special occasion.
~Author Unknown