R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

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

But time has set its maggot on their track.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.

There's nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it.

We have lived long enough to experience the hollowness of earth and the rottenness of all carnal promises.

The first thing you have to do is accept that decay sets in and there's nothing you can do about it.

I believe that time destroys everything. You can take one beautiful apple, red. After a while, it becomes shrivelled and full of worms, just like what happens to us.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Everything dies, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest galaxy.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

Everything is created to be annihilated.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

Dying in a a war never stopped wars from happening.

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.

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Death devours all lovely things.

who wants flowers when youre dead? nobody.

For some reason focusing on destruction and mortality is more poetically exciting to me than hope and love.

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

The course of Nature seems a course of Death, And nothingness the whole substantial thing.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold.