The most fragile thing in the world

 Between us and hell or heaven, there is only the interval of life, the most fragile thing in the world.

Blaise Pascal — Pensees XIII,185

Pythagoras on Life

He said that life resembles a festival, where some go to compete for a prize, others to buy or sell, but the best men as spectators; for likewise in life, some men are servile by nature, hunters of fame and profit, while the philosopher hunts for the truth.

Diogenes Laertius - Lives of the eminent philosophers

Life is too short to not enjoy it

II. 86

A man's life is very short, so it is best to do what he enjoys most. It is foolhardy indeed to waste your life in this world between dreams, doing things you don't enjoy as you endure the suffering.

Hagakure

Casanova enjoys life and decries pessimists

Those who say that life is only a combination of misfortunes mean that the life itself is a misfortune. If it is a misfortune, then death is a happiness. Such purple did not write on good health, with their purses stuffed with money, and contentment in their souls from having held Cecilias and Marinas in their arms and being sure that there were more of them to come. Such men are a race of pessimists which can have existed only among ragged philosophers and rascally and atrabilious theologians. If pleasures exists, and we can only enjoy it in life, then life is a happiness. There are misfortunes, of course, as I should be the first to know. But the very existence of these misfortunes proves that the sum of good is greater.  I'm infinitely happy when I am in dark room and see the light coming through a window which opens in a vast horizon.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)

LOVE

I have absolutely no other passion but love to keep me going. What covetousness, ambition, quarrels and lawsuits do for men who, like me, have no other allotted task, love would do more suitably: it would restore me to vigilance, sober behaviour, graceful manners and care about my person; love would give new strength to my features so that the distortions of old age, pitiful and misshapen, should not come and disfigure them; it would bring me back to wise and healthy endeavours by which I could make myself better esteemed and better loved, banishing from my mind all sense of hopefulness about itself and about its application, while bringing it to know itself again: it would divert me away from a thousand painful thoughts, from a thousand melancholy sorrows which idleness burdens us with old age, as does the poor state of our health; it would, at least in dream, restore some heat to my blood - this blood of mine which Nature is forsaking; it would lift up my chin and unbuckle my sinews as well as the vigour and exhilaration of the soul for this poor fellow who is on his way out, rushing toward disintegration.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

The procreation and the extinction

No man likes to be in on a birth: all men rush to be in on a death. To unmake a human being we choose an open field in broad daylight: to make one, we hide away in a dark little hollow. When making one we must hide and blush: but glory lies in unmaking one, and it produces other virtues. One act is unwholesome: the other, an act of grace, (...)

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

Don't be a slave of your humours and complections

We should not nail ourselves so strongly to our humours and complexions. Our main talent lies in knowing how to adapt ourselves to a variety of customs. To keep ourselves bound by the bonds of necessity to one single way of life is to be, but not to live. Souls are most beautiful when they show most variety and flexibility.

If it was for me to train myself my way, there would be no mould in which I would wish to be set without being able to throw it off. Life is a rough, irregular progress with a multitude of forms. It is to be no friend of yourself - and even less master of yourself - to be a slave endlessly following yourself, so beholden to your predispositions that you cannot stray from them not bend them.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On tree kinds of social intercourse (III, 3)

Life is an illusion

MACBETH:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and furry,
Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare - Macbeth (V, 5, 24)

Teach your child this

Teach the boy this:

what he may justly wish for; that money is hard to earn and should be used properly; the extent of our duty to our country and to our dear ones; what God orders you to be, and what place He assigned to you in the scheme of things; what we are and what we shall win when we have overcome; [Persius, Satires, III, 69-73]

teach him what knowing and not knowing means (which ought to be the aim of study); what valour is, and justice and temperance; what difference there is between ordonate and inordinate aspirations; slavery and due subordonation; licence and liberty; what are the signs of true and solid happiness; how far we should fear death, pain and shame;

How we can flee from hardships and how we can endure them [Virgil, Aeneas, III, 459]

what principles govern our emotions and the physiology of so many and diverse stirrings within us. For it seems to me that the first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die... and to live.

Michel de Montaigne - Complete Essays (I, 26)

Our life according to Pythagoras

Our life, said Pythagoras, is like the vast throng assembled for the Olympic Games: some use their bodies there to win fame from the contests; others come to trade, to make a profit; still others - and they are by no means the worst - seek no other gain than to be spectators, seeing how everything is done and why; they watch how other men live so that they can judge and regulate their own lives.

Michel de Montaigne - Complete Essays (I, 26)

Be absolute for death

DUKE:

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still. Thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations that thou bear'st
Are nursed by baseness. Thou'rt by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,
And what thou hast, forget'st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear's thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.

William Shakespeare - Measure for measure (III, 1)

RSC Shakespeare - William Shakespeare The Complete Works

Life is to be enjoyed not understood

ROSALIND: I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.

William Shakespeare - As you like it