Basil Bunting Quotes

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

A human being is only breath and shadow.

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

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.

Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow.

Even though in the world you are the most learned scholar of the time, Behold the vanishing of this world and this time!

We are but phantoms ... and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights.

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.

We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.

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

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 .

Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.

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.

The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Our lives feel like these epochs, but really, we are dust in the wind.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:-- We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf.

Throughout much of our lives, our association with the temporary has risen. This transitory body, a sack of bones and flesh, is considered erroneously as our true body and we have accepted this temporary condition as conclusive.

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.