Edward Hirsch Quotes

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

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

Nothing is forever, but history is forever.

All things are subject to decay and change.

What comes will also go. What always is will alone remain.

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.

How much can come And much can go, And yet abide the world!

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

I'd be a butterfly; living a rover, Dying when fair things are fading away.

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

If things were not impermanent, life would not be possible.

Nothing is lasting but change; nothing perpetual but death.

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 .

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

If I close my eyes forever will it all remain unchanged?

Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.

The world is changing every moment, and is therefore unreal. It has non permanent existence.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

Art is longer than life.

Art is eternal, but life is short.

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

Things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay