“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 9th, 1923
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
“When Time who steals our years away
Shall steal our pleasures too,
The mem'ry of the past will stay,
And half our joys renew.”
~ Thomas Moore, 1779-1852
“So many years in one yesterday.”
~ Carla Phelps Wert
the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal
dawn and glowing, on sea and continues and islands, each
in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
~ John Muir
“All my possessions for a moment of time.”
- Queen Elizabeth I
“To these delights of a garden, age may add a further interest which can hardly be distinguished from beauty, for the mind, at least with those who have the historic instinct, is always longing to be connected with the past, and dreading for itself confinement upon the plane of time, delights in evidences of the long continuance of nations, families and institutions, in hale and vigorous old age, in long-settled peace beyond the turn of Fortune's wheel, the 'scornful dominion of accident.' Restfulness is the prevailing note of an old garden; in this fairy world of echo and suggestion where the Present Age never comes but to commune with the Past, we feel the glamour of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and secure which has grown and blossomed as the rose.”
~ Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909
“Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.”
~ Sara Teasdale, Let it Be Forgotten
“It is like clouds rising in the sky: suddenly there, gone without a trace.
And it is like drawing a pattern on water: it is neither born nor passes away.
This is cosmic peace and eternal rest.
When it is enclosed, it is called the matrix of the realization of suchness;
When it emerges from the enclosure, it is called the cosmic body of reality.”
~ Ma-tsu
"The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post."
~ Thomas Holcroft
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