Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

This world's a bubble.

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

In this world, only winter is certain

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment.

Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.

Nothing is so fickle and uncertain as popularity. It is here today and gone tomorrow. It is a sandy foundation, and sure to fail those who build upon it.

No one from the beginning of time has had security.

The innocence of virgins is like milk which turns when exposed to a clap of thunder, to a tart smell, to a hot day, to the merest nothing.

In the end, all solutions are temporary.

Nought may endure but Mutability.

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

Change is the nature of all objective things.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

Commonplace objects are constantly changing… The pies, for example, we now see, are not going to be around forever. We are merely used to the idea that things do not change.

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

It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.

No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

Nothing is of a permanent nature.

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

However good or bad a situation is, it will change.