James Gates Percival Quotes

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, waking in the dawn of the morning, in the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, sleeping in the cold night's arms.

Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either

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.

Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

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

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

Look at the fate of summer flowers, which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Beautiful things never last. That’s why fireflies flash.

Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.

How quickly passes away the glory of this world.

Flowers are without hope. Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.

All things are only transitory.

Time is not kind to everything.

All that's bright must fade, The brightest still the fleetest; All that's sweet was made But to be lost when sweetest.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.

To me, beauty and sadness are very closely linked. Truly beautiful things make me sad because I know they are going to fade. When I see a beautiful 20-year-old boy or girl-and they are breathtaking-I am filled with a kind of sadness. But maybe they are beautiful because we know they are not permanent and they are in a kind of transition.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.