The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us
This line from one of O’Neill’s characters was adopted for a History Masthead Slogan. See XXX.
In the fall, you don't grieve because the leaves are falling and dying. You say, "Isn't it beautiful!" Well, we're the same way. There are seasons. We all fall sooner or later. It's all so beautiful. And our concepts, without investigation, keep us from knowing this. It's beautiful to be a leaf, to be born, to fall, to give way to the next, to become food for the roots. It's life, always changing its form and always giving itself completely. We all do our part. No mistake.
All things are subject to decay and change.
Nothing is forever except change.
Realize that war is common and justice is strife, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.
No storm lasts forever no matter what it is. Nature builds calmness within its storms. That's true in our own lives as well. When you reach the zenith of where you are going in your life, or in a relationship; the only place you can go is down or up. That's the nature of this universe; a cyclical thing. The seasons, the moon; everything has a cycle to it.
History privileges no right side, and the arc [of history] can bend so that it loops back upon us.
Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
As every flower fades and as all youth departs, so life at every stage, so every virtue, so our grasp of truth blooms in its day and may not last forever. Since life may summon us at every age, be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavour, be ready bravely and without remorse to find new light that old ties cannot give. In all beginnings dwells a magic force for guarding us and helping us to live.
so, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang onto a rock that's falling with you. see? but everything is doing that. and so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to prevent the world from falling apart. don't do it. and then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy.
We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.
Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.
No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.
No changes are permanent, but change is.
Life cannot be destroyed for good, neithercan history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and uniquesomething truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.
Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What's closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? Can't you see? It's just the same with you - and just as vital to nature.
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.
Man is a history—making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
When you're younger you feel more invincible - that nothing is ever going to get you down or beat you. When you get a bit older, you realise the fragility of things, how easy it is to get caught out by things - and Ant did.
Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
The great mass of people are incapable of realizing that in economic life nothing is permanent except change. They regard the existing state of affairs as eternal; as it has been so shall it always be.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans resist change. Change will occur; vacuums will be filled.
This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.