C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.

In a very alert and bright state of society people learn co-operation by themselves, but in older and quieter conditions of laboring enterprise, such a bill as I propose will point out the way to mutual exertion.

To me, it's really important to drive change through a team because one person, while the buck has to stop with somebody, the company is just too big for one person.

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is.

In my end is my beginning.

Change and renewal are themes in life, aren't they? We keep growing throughout life.

That versatility, those sudden evolutions, which have sometimes derogated from the credit of all public professions, are things not so easy in large bodies, as when men act alone, or in light squadrons.

Life moves forward. The old leaves wither, die and fall away, and the new growth extends forward into the light.

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.

What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

Either things grow and change or they die.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.

Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same.

Nature grinds all of us. Keep count of the ounce of pleasure you get. In the long run, nature did her work through you, and when you die your body will make other plants grow. Yet we think all the time that we are getting pleasure ourselves. Thus the wheel goes round.

The generation of mankind is like the generation of leaves. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the living tree burgeons with leaves again in the spring.

Everything has a lifecycle. You have to believe it’s going to change.

A generation of men is like a generation of leaves; the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth - and the season of spring comes on. So of men one generation springs forth and another ceases.