William Cullen Bryant Quotes

Spring flies, and with it all the train it leads; and flowers, in fading, leave us but their seeds.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

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

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death.

Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

The Autumn is old; The sere leaves are flying; He hath gather'd up gold, And now he is dying;- Old age, begin sighing!

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

Never yet was a springtime, when the buds forgot to bloom.

Where unwilling dies the rose; buds the new another year.

Fade, flowers, fade! Nature will have it so; 'tis but what we in our autumn do.

What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

Sure thou did'st nourish once! and many springs, Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers, Passed o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings, Which now are dead, lodg'd in thy living bowers. And still a new succession sings and flies; Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot Towards the old and still-enduring skies; While the low violet thrives at their root.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

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

Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers.

Our business is with life, not death.

I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.

Earth is a flower and it's pollinating.

What ye have been ye still shall be, When we are dust the dust among, O yellow flowers!