Jonathan Swift Quotes

As generations come and go, Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, And feeble, of themselves, decay.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

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.

Everything that rises sets, and everything that grows, grows old.

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?

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.

The first thing you have to do is accept that decay sets in and there's nothing you can do about it.

Throughout the whole vegetable, sensible, and rational world, whatever makes progress towards maturity, as soon as it has passed that point, begins to verge towards decay.

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

I always figure I have this tree and there's always some green fruit that's not ready to pick or blossoms that are ready to flower; there are always some ready to drop off too.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

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.

Nature obliges everything to change about. One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age; Another grows in its place from a negligible start. So time alters the whole nature of the world And earth passes from one state to another.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.