John Galsworthy Quotes

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

That you are not already golden word in our streets Already memories Your love fades Already Whether you are no longer to have perished.

Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.

Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave, Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion.

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty.