Ivan Turgenev Quotes

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

Generations of men are like the leaves. In winter, winds blow them down to earth, but then, when spring season comes again, the budding wood grows more. And so with men: one generation grows, another dies away.

Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment. And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

A generation of men is like a generation of leaves; the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth - and the season of spring comes on. So of men one generation springs forth and another ceases.

The most mighty of nature's laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.

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?

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

Our life is made by the death of others.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

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

Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die.

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

In Hinduism, Shiva is a deity who represents transformation. Through destruction and restoration, Shiva reminds us that endings are beginnings, and that our world is constantly undergoing a cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

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.

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.

All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.

To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.

We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.