William Wordsworth Quotes

Nothing is forever in the Theatre. Whatever it is, it's here, it flares up, burns hot and then its gone.

We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.

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.

Like the dew on the mountain, like the foam on the river, like the bubble on the fountain, thou art gone, and for ever!

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.

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.

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

Like water spilt upon the ground--alas, Our little lives flow swiftly on and pass; Yet may they bring rich harvests and green grass!

So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o'er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.

And you're sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes - you're sorry, for you didn't even have time to fall in love.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I'd be a butterfly; living a rover, Dying when fair things are fading away.

Everything passes. There is great beauty in this, both in the passing of pain and in the passing of pleasure. When things present themselves to you as permanent, don't believe it.

Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew, She sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven.

Then, as horizons step, Or noons report away,Without the formula of sound, It passes, and we stay:A quality of loss Affecting our content.

But the tune ends too soon for us all

The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.

After a while you learn that everything stops.

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.

Surely 't is better, when summer is over To die when all fair things are fading away.

Time wastes too fast : every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more -- every thing presses on -- whilst thou are twisting that lock, -- see! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.