Our life is as short as a raging fire:
flames the passer-by soon forgets,
ashes the wind blows away.
A man's life.

"When you die, there is nothing — only a life that will be forgotten."

-from "Gathering Ashes"

Man is no star, but a quick coal

Of mortal fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth control

A faint desire,

Life is like a flame that is always burning itself out...

[B]ut it is only what happens, when they die, to all mortals.
The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together,
and once the spirit has let the white bones, all the rest
of the body is made subject to the fire's strong fury,
but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.

What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?

A man’s fate is a man’s fate and life is but an illusion.

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like <i>Sardanapalus</i>, but the wisedom of funerall Law found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an Urne.

A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.

Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one

A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated desires or forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a man never was young because he has grown old, or never lived because he is now dead. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two - not our exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think while there - that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it.

And without fame, a man must spend his life
Only to leave such traces upon earth
As smoke leaves in the air, or foam in the sea