
“The days are long, but the years are short.”
Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
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)
“The days are long, but the years are short.”
Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
“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).
“After a very long year we've got a very short knight.”
On the knighthood of the rather short Sir Robert Muldoon in January 1984. Lange repeated the quote on U.S. television as an explanation of Sir Robert's dislike for him.
Source: Heinemann Dictionary of New Zealand Quotations (1988), p. 397.
“Life is too short, and Proust is too long.”
Apparently an invention by Maurice Sachs; see discussion in Quotes about Proust.
Misattributed
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
“Life is short, but its ills make it seem long.”
Maxim 124
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave