Lao Tzu Quotes

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Fade, flowers, fade! Nature will have it so; 'tis but what we in our autumn do.

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, waking in the dawn of the morning, in the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, sleeping in the cold night's arms.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Even Castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.

I've been through so much in my life. I've seen so much. I know how fast things can change. I know someone can be here one minute and gone the next.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.

My voice right now, hey, listen. I don't know how long it's going to last.

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer.

The top of a pinnacle now, firewood soon

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment.

Do what you think is right, because one damn thing is an absolute, certainly: We come and go. Politicians are a dime a dozen.

Everything is fleeting and passing and impermanent in life. Relationships, people, our finite physical forms... We let go of our childhoods, we let go of different parts of our body, we lose elasticity in our skin, and we lose hair and we lose teeth.

We thought we'd last forever. Then, of course, we didn't, and that was shocking.

I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

If man were never to fade away ... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.

A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.

All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!

You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.