#permanence

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. ↗

— Robert Frost

#nature #poem #nature

Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava). ↗

— Georges Bataille

#permanence #power #stability #men

Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated. ↗

— Tryon Edwards

#basis #been #demonstrated #fact #faith

Marriage is a core institution of societies throughout the world and throughout history. It's something that has provided permanence and stability for our very social structure. ↗

— David Vitter

#history #institution #marriage #our #permanence

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away. ↗

— Zhuangzi

#away #cling #depended #everything #gradually

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi') ↗

— Dogen Zenji

#impermanence #zen #life

...and here's a secret for you - everything beautiful is sad...gilded with impermanence... ↗

— John Geddes

#impermanence #secret #temporary #beauty

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it. ↗

— Norman Granz

#apart #art #art form #attached #form

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#anachronisms #death #permanence #revolution #sociology

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

— Richard Paul Evans

#impermanence #sunsets #beauty