Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

Life is not unlike cinema. Each scene has its own music, and the music is created for the scene, woven to it in ways we do not understand. No matter how much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn't suit the moment.

I would have lived more fully in the moment, realize how easily a perfect day can slip by unnoticed. Any day is the glory day if you choose to see the glory in it

If you could know —if you could always know —when the lasts in life are coming, you'd handle them differently. You'd savor. You'd stop. You'd let nothing else invade the moment.

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Housed in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the following plate was completed in 1886, portraying the unusual subject of a skeleton smoking a cigarette. The work has roused many interpretations, including a depiction of mortality and a prophetic cry of the dangers of tobacco. In the next two years, van Gogh painted two other paintings with skulls, illustrating his fascination with the macabre subject.

Everything on earth changes - we have no abiding city here - it is the experience of everybody. That it is God's will that we should part with what is dearest on earth - we ourselves change in many respects, we are not what we once were, we shall not remain what we are now.

There was enough reason for it too, as the whole of France was shaken. Certainly in our eyes the election and its results and its representatives are only symbols. But what it proves once more is that worldly ambition and fame pass away, but the human heart beats the same to this day, in as perfect sympathy with the past of our buried forefathers as with the generation to come.

Trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen.

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.