“Eternity has no gray hairs! The flowers fade, the heart withers, man grows old and dies, the world lies down in the sepulchre of ages, but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of Eternity.”
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 213.
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Reginald Heber 21
English clergyman 1783–1826Related quotes

Letter to Colonel A. F. Rockwell (13 August 1866)
1860s

“The world grows old,
and growing old, withers away.”
Il mondo invecchia,
E invecchiando intristisce.
Act II, scene ii.
Aminta (1573)

“A thing which fades
With no outward sign—
Is the flower
Of the heart of man
In this world!”
trans. Arthur Waley, p. 78
Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955)

“Imperceptible
It withers in the world,
This flower-like human heart.”
Source: Kenneth Rexroth's translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955), p. 46

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”
Quote in Sustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide to Green Building Outdoors (2007) by William Thompson and Kim Sorvig, p. 30
after 1930

Dubliners (1914)
Variant: One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Source: "The Dead"
Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)