“Man’s life is but a jest,
A dream, a shadow, bubble, air, a vapor at the best.”
The Jester’s Sermon. Compare: "Life is a jest and all things show it; I thought so once, but now I know it", John Gay, My own Epitaph; "Life is an empty dream", Robert Browning, Paracelsus, ii.; "Life ’s but a series of trifles at best", Anonymous.
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George Walter Thornbury 2
British writer 1828–1876Related quotes
“Bubble, bubble, flows the stream
Like an old tune through a dream.”
In Haunts of Bass and Bream.
“The world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span.”
The World (1629)
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
Variant:
What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good's but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams.
(trans. Roy Campbell)
Segismundo, Act II, l. 1195.
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)
Neb [No-one] (1985)
Context: On seeing his shadow fall on such ancient rocks, he had to question himself in a different context and ask the same old question as before, "Who am I?", and the answer now came more emphatically than ever before, "No-one."
But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."
This Life, which seems so fair http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/this-life-which-seems-so-fair-2/
“Coleridge wrote, "Dreams are no shadows, but the very substances and calamities of my life.”
Source: Memories of Midnight
“Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summ'd with all his substance.”
Act I, scene i.
Bussy D'Ambois (1607)
