“Time passeth swift away;
Our life is frail, and we may die to-day.”

— Christopher Marlowe , Tamburlaine

Mycetes, Act I, scene i, line 68
Tamburlaine (c. 1588)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Time passeth swift away; Our life is frail, and we may die to-day." by Christopher Marlowe?

Christopher Marlowe 55

English dramatist, poet and translator 1564–1593

Related quotes

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

“We are all the fools of time and terror: Days
Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

“Our youth we can have but to-day,
We may always find time to grow old.”

George Berkeley (1685–1753) Anglo-Irish philosopher

Can Love be controlled by Advice?, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“To us there has come a time, in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock — to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of inaction.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)

“Though we may in quiet times confront the fact that we are going to die, much of our daily life is lived in the artificial realness created through culture. This illusion of realness helps to disguise our unconscious fear that everything is highly vulnerable and transitory.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 213

“Reality is, after all, too big for our frail understanding to fully comprehend. Nevertheless, we have to build our life on the theory which contains the maximum truth.”

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) Indian nationalist leader and politician

As quoted in An Indian pilgrim: an unfinished autobiography (1997) by himself, Sisir Kumar Bose, and Sugata Bose, p. 124
Context: Reality is, after all, too big for our frail understanding to fully comprehend. Nevertheless, we have to build our life on the theory which contains the maximum truth. We cannot sit still because we cannot, or do not, know the Absolute Truth.

“Far from the battle, on that fatal day
Beside Thermodon may I flee away,
Or view it as an eagle from the sky;
There shall the vanquished weep, the victor die.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Demosthenes, sec. 19
Parallel Lives

“Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

"Nephelidia", line 16, from The Heptalogia (1880); Swinburne intended "Nephelidia" as a self-parody.

“God grant that by my persevering labours I may bring a little stone to the frail and ill-assured edifice of our knowledge of those deep mysteries of Life and Death where all our intellects have so lamentably failed.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Source: The Life of Pasteur (1902), p. 114

“The peace that passeth understanding is that which comes when the pain is not relieved, which subsists in the midst of the painful situation, suffusing it, which springs out of the pain itself, which shimmers on the crest of the wave of pain, which is the spear of frustration transfigured into the shaft of light. It is upon those we love that we must anchor ourselves spiritually in the last moments. The sense of interconnectedness with them stands out vividly by way of contrast at the very moment when our mortal connection with them is about to be dissolved. And the intertwining of our life with theirs, the living in the life that is in them, is but a part of our living in the infinite manifold of the spiritual life. The thought of this, as apprehended, not in terms of knowledge, but in immediate experience, begets the peace that passeth understanding. And it is upon the bosom of that peace that we can pass safely out of the realm of time and space.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Book IV, Ch. 10 "The Last Outlook On Life"
Founding Address (1876), An Ethical Philosopy of Life (1918)

“Time passeth swift away;Our life is frail, and we may die to-day.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Christopher Marlowe 55

Related quotes

Related topics

“Time passeth swift away;
Our life is frail, and we may die to-day.”