Simon Schama Quotes

A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

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.

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

Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave, Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm.

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.

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.

Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

If I describe a sunny morning in May (the buds, the wet-winged flies, the warm sun and cool breeze), I am also implying the perishing quality of a morning in May, and a good description of May sets up the possibility of a May disaster.

Nothing gold can stay.

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.

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.

Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.

We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them.

Surely 't is better, when summer is over To die when all fair things are fading away.

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.