We Are as Mayflies/Quotes

"The river rises, flows over its banks and carries us all away like mayflies floating downstream. They stare at the sun, then all at once there is nothing."

- Utanapishtim, The Epic of Gilgamesh

"Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind. Have you drunk your fill?"

- Lady Deirdre Skye, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

"The purpose of life, Mr Anderson, is to End."

- Agent Smith, The Matrix

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

- Roy Batty, Blade Runner

"Do not waste your tears. I was not born to watch the world grow dim. Life is not measured in years, but by the deeds of men."

- Saint Sabbat, Warhammer 40,000

"Life's a journey. Shame about the destination."

- Commissar Ciaphas Cain, Warhammer 40,000

"How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks."

- Lord Peter Wimsey, in Gaudy Night

"It Ends. That is what gives it value."

- Death of the Endless, The Sandman

"[L]ook at the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?"

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (trans. George Long)

"“It was,” said he, “the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since, by the apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, also, no more! And I must soon follow them; for, by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! ...My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to its end and be buried in universal ruin?""

- A mayfly, "The Ephemera: An Emblem of Human Life" by Benjamin Franklin

"I have three sets of memories. The first spans a period of just sixty years.The second spans twenty thousand years, and is shared by a hive-mind of Eina-Afa. The third is fragments from a fifty-thousand-year life that ended around eleven million years ago. So when you say life is too short, I am inclined to agree with you. But I doubt that you and I will agree on a definition for the word "short"."

- Meld-minister Miamumla, Schlock Mercenary, November 28, 2014