In myriad swarms, each summer sun An insect nation shows;
Whose being, since he rose, begun; And e’er he sets will close.Brief is their date, confin’d their pow’rs, The fluttering of a day;—
Yet life’s worth living, ev’n for hours, When all those hours—are play.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance — arguably the most valuable substance we possess — and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.

Little drops of water, Little grains of sand, Make the mighty ocean And the pleasant land. Thus the little minutes, Humble though they be, Make the mighty ages Of eternity.

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," — "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, — what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."

O multicoloured hours!… Moments like flowers, minutes like trees, O time frozen in space, time dead from space and covered by flowers, by the fragrance of flowers, and by the fragrance of the names of flowers!…

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
Life's but a means unto an end; that end
Beginning, mean, and end to all things, — God.
The dead have all the glory of the world.

O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives The moths & atheists are doubly divine & dying We live, we die and death not ends it

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.

These are the moments for which we live.

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

And what is Life? — An hour-glass on the run,
A mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length? — A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought;
And happiness? — A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

Ah! what is human life?
How, like the dial's tardy-moving shade,
Day after day slides from us unperceiv'd!
The cunning fugitive is swift by stealth;
Too subtle is the movement to be seen;
Yet soon the hour is up—and we are gone.

My bits of time play with eternity.