T. S. Eliot Quotes

As for success, I don't care for it. It is a fragile thing.

Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

The oaths of a woman I inscribe on water.

Nothing prospers to the end.

Sometimes you think things are going to be forever, and then... of course, they're not.

I do have in the back of my head that you never know how long it lasts.

In case you guys didn't catch last week's episode, I'm out of the flock," I informed them. "Angel has no allegiance to me. She's wanted me gone for a long time. And in case you didn't catch all the episodes from the past year, Angel is... unbalanced." "Untrustworthy," Fang seconded. "Unpredictable," Jeb added. "Dangerous," Dylan chimed in.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.

Everything that comes together falls apart.

Everything is temporary if you give it enough time.

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

Nothing is so fickle and uncertain as popularity. It is here today and gone tomorrow. It is a sandy foundation, and sure to fail those who build upon it.

The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries--the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America's theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses--especially the grander ones--have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies.

Nothing is of a permanent nature.

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.

When the forces that hold it together go away, the body must fall.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

Power gives no purchase to the hand, it will not hold, soon perishes, and greatness goes.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.

The world is changing every moment, and is therefore unreal. It has non permanent existence.

The appearance of strength is all about you. It would seem to last forever. However... the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen... and you will hear the creaking.

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability!

The flowers of life are but visionary. How many pass away and leave no trace behind! How few yield any fruit,--and the fruit itself, how rarely does it ripen! And yet there are flowers enough; and is it not strange, my friend, that we should suffer the little that does really ripen to rot, decay, and perish unenjoyed?