Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality--

Today is life - the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto

Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.

I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. - Song of Myself : 6

Life is the little that is left over from dying.

AS THE TIME DRAWS NIGH As the time draws nigh, glooming, a cloud, A dread beyond, of I know not what, darkens me. I shall go forth, I shall traverse The States awhile—but I cannot tell whither or how long; Perhaps soon, some day or night while I am singing, my voice will suddenly cease. O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this? Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?… And yet it is enough, O soul! O soul! we have positively appear'd—that is enough.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

You can't tell a dead man you're sorry.