“Chorus [leader]: Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span, / Protracted with sorrow from day to day, / Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, / Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!”
heavily rewritten tr. Frere 1839, p. 38 http://books.google.com/books?id=Bk8JAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Sickly%2C+calamitous+creatures+of+clay%22 <br class="br">Birds (414 BC)
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Aristophanés56
Athenian playwright of Old Comedy -448–-386 BCRelated quotes
Thomas Moss (minister) (1740–1808) British writer
The Beggar, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Thomas Campion (1567–1620) English composer, poet and physician
The Man of Life Upright
“Whose life is a bubble, and in length a span.”
William Browne (1590–1645) English poet
Book i. Song 2. Compare: "Who then to frail mortality shall trust/ But limns on water, or but writes in dust", Francis Bacon, The World.
Britannia's Pastorals (1613)
Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress
Source: The Funny Thing Is...
“Barren are the years behind me. This is the first day of my span, here is the threshold of my life.”
Steriles transmisimus annos:
haec aevi mihi prima dies, hic limina vitae.
ii, line 12
Silvae, Book IV
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
Journal entry (26 July 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3
George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention
Letter to a member of the Brent family (2 October 1778) http://www.virginia1774.org/ToMrBrent.html