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 40000

Life's a journey. Shame about the destination. —Commissar Ciaphas Cain, Warhammer 40000

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)

Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing. —Sovereign, Mass Effect

“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