Omar Khayyam Quotes

You are permanent, but this life is not.

The body is the soul's poor house or home, whose ribs the laths are and whose flesh the loam.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore.

The Enlightened one has told you in never-to-be-forgotten words that this little span of life is but a passing shadow, a fleeting thing.

I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far,-- Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.

We brought nothing into this world and it's certain we can carry nothing out.

To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.

The basic rules of life would indicate that it can't last forever, and we'll fall off of the wave and have to climb onto another, but I don't think about it too much. We just keep moving.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

Nothing can happen more than once, but everything must happen one day; Over hill and dale, wood and stream, my dying voice will blow away. . .

Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave 's narrowness, though not its peace.

In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

Even thou who mournst the daisy's fate, That fate is thine--no distant date; Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight Shall be thy doom!