Ruth Ozeki Quotes

For every minute, the future is becoming the past.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives. That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die.

All things flow, nothing abides.

The river where you set your foot just now is gone-those waters give way to this, now this.

Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.

Time will pass and seasons will come and go.

We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go.

Time takes all and gives all.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

I had to make my history quick because there would be no future, merely a gossamer world blown about on the zeitgeist, till zeitgeist, the wind of the times, is blasted away by kamikaze, the wind of God.

It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it's the most beautiful thing we have in our lives - time.

Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be.

We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing, too

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.

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

In the nature of things, I must soon lose sight of this sense of constant metamorphosis whose limits bound our human life.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, Tomorrow will be dying.

You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty.

No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.