Identify quoatation, please.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

Who said, roughly : “Man labors, loves his children, and dies”?

Or words to that effect.
Existentialist, isn’t it?

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

I’m thinking Maugham: “I do not believe that I am influenced only by an illusion natural to the man of letters to think that the best pattern of all is the husbandman’s, who ploughs his land and reaps his crop, who enjoys his toil and enjoys his leisure, loves, marries, begets children, and dies.”

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

Or, as Vernadsky curtly put it: “The cycle of human life is eternal, in the sense in which it is determined by nature. Man is born, grows up, marries, begets children, and dies. It is but natural that he should desire properly to observe the main landmarks of the cycle. In our days of urbanized and mechanized civilization the ceremonies bearing on each link of the chain of life are reduced to a minimum.”

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

…or, coming back around to Maugham: “He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect?”

[GreenWyvern]

Said much better by James Rebanks in The Shepherd’s Life:

There is no beginning, and there is no end. The sun rises, and falls, each day, and the seasons come and go. The days, months, and years alternate through sunshine, rain, hail, wind, snow, and frost. The leaves fall each autumn and burst forth again each spring. The earth spins through the vastness of space. The grass comes and goes with the warmth of the sun. The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person. We are born, live our working lives, and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter. We are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true. Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

All close, but not quite there.

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

How about this?

The simplest pattern of life, in which a man is born, works, marries, has children, and dies, appears to him to have a value to which he has been blind. To be sure, life has no meaning or purpose external to itself; that he never ceases to believe. But now he feels that it may have an inherent meaning within itself, that the process of living is a self-justifying one.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

Still not there.

Hmmmm…