Omar Khayyam Quotes

There is nothing in the whole world which abides. All things are in a state of ebb and flow, and every shadow passes away. Even time itself, like a river, is constantly gliding away .

Everything is transient. Everything is constantly changing. The only thing we have is now.

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

Everything in life is just for a while.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

All things are subject to decay and change.

As long as you are a part of the physical process of the existence, there is nothing that does not change.

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.

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.

Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.

Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

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

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

Nothing is permanent.

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

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment.

Up with the sun. Gone with the wind.

All things change, and you yourself are constantly wasting away. So also is the universe.

All suffering goes just as it came. So it is with the glories and tragedies of the world.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.