Richard Wilbur Quotes

He has no idea how beautiful the ordinary becomes once it disappears.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

How blessings brighten as they take their flight.

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.

I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.

Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away.

Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I held you in my hands, Wanderer, and you were beautiful.

The more you own, the more you know you don't own.

I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.

So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.

There's a sadness about love, a melancholy and a sadness about beauty. It's just part of the human experience of living on this planet.

It amazes me, and I know the wind will surely someday blow it all away It amazes me, and I'm so very grateful that You made the world this way

the most deeply moving element in the contemplation of beauty is the element of loss. We desire to hold; but the sunset melts into the night, and the secret of the painting on the wall can never be the secret of the buyer.

Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colorful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself.

Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent.

All beautiful forms of this world are in the process of transformation. Nothing is stable. With every moment, our reality is changing. Mother Ganges, like nature, is constant, but no manifestation of hers remains. Likewise, all that we hold dear in this world is imperceptibly vanishing. We cannot cling to anything. But if we can appreciate the beauty of the underlying current of truth, we can enjoy a reality deeper than the fickle waves of joy and sorrow.