Walter Scott Quotes

The flower fades and dies; but he who wears the flower has not to mourn for it for ever.

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.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.

Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora the lovely Roman?Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais,Neither of them the fairer woman?Where is Echo, beheld of no man,Only heard on river and mere-She whose beauty was more than human?-But where are the snows of yester-year?

Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world's movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about.

Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust. Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

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.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

Four ducks on a pond, / A grass-bank beyond, / A blue sky of spring, / White clouds on the wing: / What a little thing / To remember for years - / To remember with tears!.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Nothing mortal is enduring, and there is nothing sweet which does not presently end in bitterness.

The May of life blooms once and never again.

Beautiful things never last. That’s why fireflies flash.

It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--