Paul Celan Quotes

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either

Impermanence is the very essence of joy-the drop of bitterness that enables one to perceive the sweet.

Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.

All that's bright must fade, The brightest still the fleetest; All that's sweet was made But to be lost when sweetest.

The temporal quality of all things was being firmly impressed upon me.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life... are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.

We write our names in the sand: and then the waves roll in and wash them away.

Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away.

Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

Nothing gold can stay.

Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.

Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows That for oblivion take their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of earth.