“Don't take life too seriously. After all none of us are getting out alive anyway.”
Source: Simply Irresistible
Roadstrum to Puckett, on using crew members to test the lethality of the Siren-Zo, in Ch. 4
Space Chantey (1968)
“Don't take life too seriously. After all none of us are getting out alive anyway.”
Source: Simply Irresistible
Variant: Life... It's a great and terrible and short and endless thing. None of us come out of it alive.
"April", in Poems (1859)
Context: Awakener, come!
Fiing wide the gate of an eternal year,
The April of that glad new heavens and earth
Which shall grow out of these, as spring-tide grows
Slow out of winter's breast.
Let Thy wide hand
Gather us all — with none left out (O God!
Leave Thou out none!) from the east and from the west.
Loose Thou our burdens: heal our sicknesses;
Give us one heart, one tongue, one faith, one love.
In Thy great Oneness made complete and strong —
To do Thy work throughout the happy world —
Thy world, All-merciful, Thy perfect world.
Source: White-Jacket (1850), Ch. 63
This has sometimes been paraphrased: A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. where "hard" can readily be taken to imply "harsh" words rather than those "difficult to understand".
Context: A man of true science... uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.
Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)
To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
“FABLEHAVEN: None who enter will leave unchanged. Trespassers will be turned to stone.”
“A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.”
Letter to Robert Morris (30 April 1781)