Omar Khayyam Quotes

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

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.

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.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

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

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

When we look at the flowers, we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.

Our birth is nothing but our death begun, As tapers waste the moment they take fire.

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.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

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

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.

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

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

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

That flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late.

There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Birth was the death of him.

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.