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Sidney Blumenthal, a political historian and former assistant and senior adviser to Clinton, said: “I am afraid I have not wasted my limited time on Earth on Newt Gingrich’s oeuvre. Life is short, art is long, Gingrich doesn’t fit.”

Life is short, art is long … Bulgakov didn’t have children, his children are his books.

It is a quiet but emphatic metaphor: life is short, art is long, the work outstays the worker.

Examples: A maxim of Hippocrates, in Old English lettering, hangs beside the desk of Dr. Roscoe Roy Spencer in Bethesda, Md.: Life is short, Art is long The occasion instant Experiment perilous Decision difficult.

The first aphorism, perhaps the best known of all, which serves as a kind of introduction to the book, runs as follows:—“Life is short, art is long, opportunity fugitive, experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult: it is necessary not only to do oneself what is right, but also to be seconded by the patient, by those who attend him, by external circumstances.”