“Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and — sans End!”
The Rubaiyat (1120)
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Omar Khayyám 94
Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer 1048–1131Related quotes

“We can show the way. We can make dust -- or eat dust.”
State of the State address http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/d/x/dxd22/1993B.htm (2 February 1993)

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: The bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states—buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done.

“We are but dust and shadow.”
Pulvis et umbra sumus.
Book IV, ode vii, line 16
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)