Creatures of a day, what is anyone?  What is he not?  Man is but a dream of a shadow.  Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rest upon men a radiant light.

Pindar, Odes for Victorious Athletes

If someone with a sharp axe
hacks off the boughs of a great oak tree,
and spoils its handsome shape;
although its fruit has failed, yet it can give an account of itself
if it come later to a winter fire
or if it rests on the pillars of some palace
and does a sad task among foreign walls
when there is nothing left in the place it comes from.

Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode as translated by Bernard Williams
and quoted in Charles Freeman's magisterial Egypt, Greece and Rome