“Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.”
Die Kunst ist lang, das Leben kurz, das Urteil schwierig, die Gelegenheit flüchtig.
Bk. VII, Ch. 9
Cf. Hippocrates, Ars longa vita brevis, Aphorisms 1:1
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)
Original
Die Kunst ist lang, das Leben kurz, das Urteil schwierig, die Gelegenheit flüchtig.
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 185
German writer, artist, and politician 1749–1832Related quotes
“Art is long, life is short.”
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Seneca's (De Brevitate Vitae, 1.1) Latin translation of the Greek by Hippocrates.
Misattributed
“Art indeed is long, but life is short.”
Upon the Death of Lord Hastings (1649), last line
Variant: "Art is long, and time is fleeting." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life (1839).
Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 3, The Sensibility of the Sixties, p. 124
Ὁ βίος βραχὺς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρὴ, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξὺς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερὴ, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή. Δεῖ δὲ οὐ μόνον ἑωυτὸν παρέχειν τὰ δέοντα ποιεῦντα, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν νοσέοντα, καὶ τοὺς παρεόντας, καὶ τὰ ἔξωθεν.
1:1, Variant translation: Art is long; life is short; opportunity is fleeting; judgement is difficult; experience is deceitful. Compare: "The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne", Geoffrey Chaucer, The Assembly of Fowles, line 1.
Aphorisms
Canto XIX, lines 79–81 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso
“Life is short, but the years are long.”
Part of the secret "call and response" codewords by which members of the long-lived Howard Families can identify others:
: Life is short.
But the years are long.
Not while the evil days come not.
Methuselah's Children (1958)
Winter, An Ode. The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787), p. 355