Al Stewart Quotes

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Permanent superiority has never been realized by any nation in history. After the rise comes the fall.

All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.

Today's empire is tomorrow's ashes...

Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.

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

As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

A day lays low and lifts up again all human things.

The nation that is supreme above all others during one age, will be eclipsed by another in the next age.

Every empire eventually falls.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

Look at the history of empires. They come and they go. They ebb and they flow.

One of the things that I'm fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies.

Nothing can stay great forever, and nothing can stay horrible forever.

All live to die, and rise to fall.

All empires fall eventually. It is the way of things.

The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn't come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

Life, the permission to know death.

Yet, though it is like this, simply, flowers fall amid our longing and weeds spring up amid our antipathy.

Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or at the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

Nature grinds all of us. Keep count of the ounce of pleasure you get. In the long run, nature did her work through you, and when you die your body will make other plants grow. Yet we think all the time that we are getting pleasure ourselves. Thus the wheel goes round.