Quotes about dust (703 quotes, page 5) | Quotes of famous people

“The Shariat prevails under the shadow of the sword (al Shara‘ tahat al-saif) - according to this (saying), the Shariat can triumph only with the help of mighty kings and their good administration. But for some time past this saying has been languishing, which means inevitably that Islam has become weak. The unbelievers (Hindus) of Hindustan are demolishing mosques, and erecting their own places of worship on the same sites. There was a mosque in the tank of Kurukhet (Kurukshetra) at Thanesar, as also the tomb of some (Muslim) saint. These have been demolished, and a huge gurudwara has been constructed on the same sites. Besides, the kafirs are holding many celebrations of kufr…
It is a thousand pities that the reigning king is a Mussalman, and we recluses find ourselves helpless. There was a time when Islam stood glorified due to the might and prestige of its kings, and the Ulama and the Sufis were honoured and held in high regard. It was with their help that the kings made the Shariat prevail. I have heard that one day Amir Taimur was passing through the bazar at Bukhara when, by chance, the inmates of Khwaja Naqshbandi’s khanqah were beating the dust out of the mats used in that place. Because Islam was intact in Amir Taimur, he stopped at that spot and regarded the dust of the khanqah as musk and sandal. He met a good end.”

Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) Indian philosopher

Maktubat-i-Imam Rabbani translated into Urdu by Maulana Muhammad Sa’id Ahmad Naqshbandi, Deoband, 1988, Volume II, p.1213. This letter was written to Mir Muhammad Nu‘man, obviously in the reign of Akbar.
From his letters

Chance , Time , Past , Help

“The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" Out, Out — http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/out-out-2/"
1910s

“And Men seye in theise Contrees, that Philosophres som tyme wenten upon theise Hilles, and helden to here Nose a Spounge moysted with Watre, for to have Eyr; for the Eyr above was so drye. And aboven, in the Dust and in the Powder of tho Hilles, thei wroot Lettres and Figures with hire Fingres: and at the zeres end thei comen azen, and founden the same Lettres and Figures, the whiche thei hadde writen the zeer before, withouten ony defaute.”

John Mandeville (1300–1372) writer

And Men say in these Countries, that Philosophers some time went upon these Hills, and held to their Noses a Sponge moisted with Water, to have Air; for the Air above was so dry. And above, in the Dust and in the Powder of those Hills, they wrote Letters and Figures with their Fingers. And at the Year's End they came again, and found the same Letters and Figures, the which they had written the Year before, without any Default.
Describing early ascents of Mounts Olympus and Athos.
Source: The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt., Ch. 3

Men

“Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 11

Life , God , Imagination , Intelligence

“Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A Psalm of Life

St. 2.
A Psalm of Life (1839)

Life , Art , Soul

“As we liked to do as children, extracting from the soft forest floor the light chestnut trees only a few centimeters high at the base of which the chestnut continues to shine to the sun its clods of soil from the past, the chestnut conserving all of its presence and witnessing with its presence the power of green hands, of shadow, of airy white or pink pyramids of dances.... and of future chestnuts which, under new dust, would be discovered by the marveled sight of other children. It is in this perspective that the work of Arp, more than any other, should be situated. He found the most vital in himself in the secrets of this germinating life where the most minimal detail is of the greatest importance, where, on the other hand, the distinction between the elements becomes meaningless, adopting a peculiar under the rock humor permanently.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote from Anthologie de l'humour noir, André Breton; as cited in Arp, ed. Serge Fauchereau, Ediciones Poligrafa S. A., Barcelona, Spain, 1988
after 1930

Life , Children , Secret , Tree

“When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

XXVI Sermons, No. 26, Death's Duel, last sermon, February 15, 1631

“I got God on my side.
I'm just trying to survive.
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love?
Fear's a powerful thing;
It can turn your heart black you can trust.
It'll take your God filled soul
And fill it with devils and dust”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Devils & Dust"
Song lyrics, Devils & Dust (2005)

Love , God , Fear , Soul

“We read events by what goes before and after. We think of Bunker Hill as the first real battle for independence, the prelude to the Revolution. Yet these were both after thoughts. Independence Day was still more than a year away and then eight years from accomplishment. The Revolution cannot be said to have become established until the adoption of the Federal Constitution. No, on this June day, these were not the conscious objects sought. They were contending for the liberties of the country, they were not yet bent on establishing a new nation nor on recognizing that relationship between men which the modern world calls democracy. They were maintaining well their traditions, these sons of Londonderry, lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray, and these sons of the Puritans, whom Macaulay tells us humbly abased themselves in the dust before the Lord, but hesitated not to set foot upon the neck of their king.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

From a speech https://coolidgefoundation.org/resources/early-speeches-1890-1918-17/ delivered on Bunker Hill Day (17 June 1918).
1910s, Speech on Bunker Hill Day (17 June 1918)

Men , World , Democracy , Lovers

“Wheels can take you around.
Wheels can cut you down.
We can go from boom to bust.
From dreams to a bowl of dust.
We can fall from rockets' red glare, down to "Brother can you spare…"
Another war.
Another wasteland.
And another lost generation
-- Between The Wheels (1984)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

War , Dreams

“An aching to be once again in the land from which he grew gave him no rest. There is no calm for those who are uprooted. They are wanderers, homesick and defiant. Love itself is helpless to heal them though the dust rises with every footfall—drifts down the corridors—settles on branch or cornice—each breath an inhalation from the past so that the lungs, like a miner’s, are dark with bygone times.
Whatever they eat, whatever they drink, is never the bread of home or the corn of their own valleys. It is never the wine of their own vineyards. It is a foreign brew.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 34 (p. 862)

Love , Home , Drink , Wine

“On the day that you were born
The angels got together
And decided to create a dream come true
So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair of gold
And starlight in your eyes of blue.”

Hal David (1921–2012) American lyricist

Song (They Long to be) Close to You

Dreams , Angels

“You were compelled to?' he repeated. 'You mean you weren't sufficiently powerful to resist?'
'In order to seize power,' replied the dictator, 'I had to take it from those that had it, and in order to keep it I had to employ it against those that sought to deprive me of it.'
The chef's hat gave a nod. 'An old, old story. It has been repeated a thousand times, but no one believes it. That's why it will be repeated a thousand times more.'
The dictator felt suddenly exhausted. He would gladly have sat down to rest, but the old man and the children walked on and he followed them.
'What about you?' he blurted out, when he had caught the old man up. 'What do you know of power? Do you seriously believe that anything great can be achieved on earth without it?'
'I?' said the old man. 'I cannot tell great from small.'
'I wanted power so that I could give the world justice,' bellowed the dictator, and blood began to trickle afresh from the wound in his forehead, 'but to get it I had to commit injustice, like anyone who seeks power. I wanted to end oppression, but to do so I had to imprison and execute those who opposed me - I became an oppressor despite myself. To abolish violence we must use it, to eliminate human misery we must inflict it, to render war impossible we must wage it, to save the world we must destroy it. Such is the true nature of power.'
Chest heaving, he had once more barred the old man's path with his pistol ready.'
'Yet you love it still,' the old man said softly.
'Power is the supreme virture!' The dictator's voice quavered and broke. 'But its sole shortcoming is sufficient to spoil the whole: it can never be absolute - that's what makes it so insatiable. The only true form of power is omnipotence, which can never be attained, hence my disenchantment with it. Power has cheated me.'
'And so,' said the old man, 'you have become the very person you set out to fight. It happens again and again. That is why you cannot die.'
The dictator slowly lowered his gun. 'Yes,' he said, 'you're right. What's to be done?'
'Do you know the legend of the Happy Monarch?' asked the old man.
…
'When the Happy Monarch came to build the huge, mysterious palace whose planning alone had occupied ten whole years of his life, and to which marvelling crowds made pilgrimage long before its completion, he did something strange. No one will ever know for sure what made him do it, whether wisdom or self-hatred, but the night after the foundation stone had been laid, when the site was dark and deserted, he went there in secret and buried a termites' nest in a pit beneath the foundation stone itself. Many decades later - almost a life time had elapsed, and the many vicissitudes of his turbulent reign had long since banished all thought of the termites from his mind - when the unique building was finished at last and he, its architect and author, first set foot on the battlements of the topmost tower, the termites, too, completed their unseen work. We have no record of any last words that might shed light on his motives, because he and all his courtiers were buried in the dust and rubble of the fallen palace, but long-enduring legend has it that, when his almost unmarked body was finally unearthed, his face wore a happy smile.”

Michael Ende (1929–1995) German author

"Mirror in the Mirror", page 193

Love , Life , Wisdom , War

“How life effaces as it goes
The keenest pang of earlier woes.
How careless and how cold we grow,
Dry as the dust we tread below;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life

“The continent had to be discovered emotionally. It had to become a homeland and feel like home. The sense of overpowering space, the isolation, the warmth of summer, the garish light, the shiny-leafed trees, the birds and insects, the smell of air filled with dust, the strange silences, and the landscapes in all their oddness had to become familiar.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

A Land Half Won (1980)

Feeling , Home , Bird , Sense

“Where my guides lead me in kindness
I follow, follow lightly,
and there are no footprints
in the dust behind us.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 3, §2 (p. 72)

“The rights of all are equal: justice, poised and balanced in eternal calm, will shake from the golden scales in which are weighed the acts of men, the very dust of prejudice and caste: No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the rights of men.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Centennial Oration (4 July 1876) http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/centennial_oration.html

Men , Justice , Color , Change

“You may write me down in history
With your bitter twisted lies
You may trod me down in the very dirt
And still like the dust I'll rise.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

I'll Rise, written by Ben Harper and Maya Angelou.
Song lyrics, Welcome to the Cruel World (1994)

History

“Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Lead Belly too
An' to all the good people that traveled with you
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Compare: "We come with the dust and we go with the wind." Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty.
Song lyrics, Bob Dylan (1962), Song to Woody

Men , People , Travel , Heart

“When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

An Appeal to the Young (1880)

Justice

“It is not simply that a clear understanding is acquired of the movements of the great bodies which we regard as the system of the world, but it is that we are introduced to a perception of laws governing the motion of all matter, from the finest particle of dust to the largest planet or sun, with a degree of uniformity and constancy, which otherwise we could hardly have conceived. Astronomy is pre-eminently the science of order.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

World , Law , Understanding , Science

“My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don't need to fuss and moan —
"Moss does not cling to a rolling stone."

My body? — Oh! — If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to all of you. [Joe Hill]”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

My Last Will http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Last_Will (1915-11-18)

Life , Flowers

“And cities arose and shed their houses in dust, and ever the desert returned again to its own, and covered over and hid the last of all that had troubled its repose.
And still men slew men.
And I came at last to a time when men set their yoke no longer upon beasts but made them beasts of iron.
And after that did men slay men with mists.
Then, because the slaying exceeded their desire, there came peace upon the world that was brought by the hand of the slayer, and men slew men no more.”

Lord Dunsany book The Gods of Pegāna

The Gods of Pegāna, Of how Imbaun Became High Prophet in Aradec of All the Gods save One

Men , World , Peace , Time

“I’ve never wanted to fit in Abbaji’s shoes and am happy to walk in my own. My father made it categorically clear even when my brothers or me performed with him. “I don’t expect my sons to be me because what I’m doing is already done. They’ve to be better than me,” he’d say. “Photocopies are eventually consigned to the dust bin and only originals preserved.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I've never wanted to fit in Abbaji's shoes: Ustad Zakir Hussain

Shoe , Happiness

“Now I been out in the desert, just doin' my time.
Searchin' through the dust, lookin' for a sign.
If there's a light up ahead well brother I don't know.
But I got this fever burnin' in my soul.
So let's take the good times as they go,
And I'll meet you further on up the road.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Further On (Up the Road)"
Song lyrics, The Rising (2002)

Soul , Light , Time

“Let the poet dream his dreams. Yet, the poet must look at the world; must enter into other men's lives; must look at the earth and the sky, must examine the dust in the street; must walk through the world and his mirror.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

The Artist and His Mirror, W. Baziotes, in Right Angle Vol. III, no. 2, Washington DC, June 1949
1940s

Men , World , Dreams

“Every riot is followed by an Inquiry Committee, but its report is never published. Take U. P. for instance. A report in the Times of India of 13.12.1990 from Lucknow says: “At least a dozen judicial inquiry reports into the genesis of communal riots in the state have never seen the light of the day. They have been buried in the secretariat-files over the past two decades. The failure of the successive state governments to publish these reports and initiate action has given credence to the belief that they are not serious about checking communal violence… There were other instances when the state government instituted an inquiry and then scuttled the commissions. In the 1982 and 1986 clashes in Meerut and in the 1986 riots in Allahabad, the judicial inquiries were ordered only as an ‘eye-wash’…” Judicial inquiries are ordered as an eye-wash because the perpetrators of riots are known but cannot be booked. In a secular state it is neither proper to name them nor political to punish them. Inquiry committee reports are left to gather dust, while those who should be punished are pampered and patronised as vote-banks in India’s democratic setup. Therefore communal riots in India as a legacy of Muslim rule may continue to persist. If these could help in partitioning the country, they could still help in achieving many other goals.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 8

Books , Communication , Failure , Light

“According to my first birth I am nothing but unclean slime and dust of earth, conceived and born in sin from my mother's womb, and educated all my life in all manner of ignorance, sin and blindness, until the clear light of grace and knowledge appeared unto me from high heaven and which has given me such a heart, will and desire, that I willingly seek after that which is good, and strive, with holy Paul to "follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus," Phil. 3: 12.”

Menno Simons (1496–1561) Dutch theologian, founder of the Mennonites

Ibid, p.248

Life , Education , Birth , Knowledge

“Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend: such nails are then thrown into the dust or into the furnace.”

Walter Savage Landor Imaginary Conversations

"Cromwell and Noble".
Imaginary Conversations (1824-1829)

Men

“When these barbarians replicated with Steven what they did with Foley, who is from New Hampshire, they somehow think that it's going to lessen US resolve, frighten us, intimidate us. But if they think the American people will be intimidated, they don't know us very well. We came back after 9/11, we dusted ourselves off and we made sure that Osama Bin Ladin would never ever again threaten the American people. We came back Boston strong, blaming no one, but resolve to be certain that this didn't happen again. Today America may be still grieving from Jim Foley, a native from New Hampshire as I said he grew up in Rochester, but the American people are so much stronger, so much more resolved than any enemy can fully understand. As a nation, we are united. And when people harm Americans, we don't retreat, we don't forget, we take care of those grieving. And when that's finished, they should know [that] we follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice, because hell is where they will reside.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Joe Biden Speech Transcript: We Will Follow Them to the Gates of Hell http://www.crossmap.com/news/joe-biden-speech-transcript-we-will-follow-them-to-the-gates-of-hell-11970#ixzz3R6YDaKKw (September 3 2014)
2000s

People , Justice , Hell , Understanding

“Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit — the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. … This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 6: Cedar Keys, pages 160-161

Pain , Star , Knowledge , Universe

“This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Historical Inevitability (1954)

World , Nature , Study , Science

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

Death , Men , Dreams , Color

“The glow has gone forever
And our dreams have turned to dust;
I don't know how I can go on,
And yet I know I must.”

Tom Springfield (1934) English musician, songwriter and record producer

Song No Sad Songs for Me.

Dreams

“One day I attempted to reach silence directly, with greater resignation, surrendering to the fate that governs any profound struggle. My millions of furious clawings became millions of grains of dust, of sand... A new geo-graphy lit my way, carrying me from surprise to surprise: suggestions of unusual combinations and molecular structures, of atomic phenomena, of the world of galaxies or of images in a microscope. The symbolism of dust — 'to be one with dust, here lies the profound identity, that is, the inner profundity between man and nature' (Tao Te Ching) —, of ashes, of the earth from whence we come and to which we return, of the solidarity born when we realise that the differences among ourselves are like those between one grain of sand and the next..”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Fate , World , Way , Nature

“Oh dear and laughing, lost to me,
Hidden in grey Eternity,
I shall attain, with burning feet,
To you and to the mercy-seat!
The ages crumble down like dust,
Dark roses, deviously thrust
And scattered in sweet wine — but I,
I shall lift up to you my cry,
And kiss your wet lips presently
Beneath the ever-living Tree.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Source: Young Adventure (1918), The Quality of Courage

Age , Kiss , Tree , Wine

“Almost 30 percent of the total matter-energy budget is said to be composed of so-called cold dark matter and almost 70 percent of "dark energy," leaving only about 4 percent as visible matter in the form of the atoms that make up the stars, planets, interstellar dust, and ourselves. Such is the degree of discrepancy between theory and observations today.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Prologue, The Elusive Planet Vulcan, A Parable, p. 5
Reinventing Gravity (2008)

Star

“Some of you may doubt the truth of what I now say, and argue that the Lord could teach him. This is a mistake. The Lord could not have taught him in any other way than in the way in which He did teach him. You believe Adam was made of the dust of this earth. This I do not believe, though it is supposed that it is so written in the Bible; but it is not, to my understanding. You can write that information to the States, if you please-that I have publicly declared that I do not believe that portion of the Bible as the Christian world do. I never did, and I never want to. What is the reason I do not? Because I have come to understanding, and banished from my mind all the baby stories my mother taught me when I was a child. But suppose Adam was made and fashioned the same as we make adobies; if he had never drunk of the bitter cup; the Lord might have talked to him to this day, and he would have continued as he was to all eternity, never advancing one particle in the school of intelligence. This idea opens up a field of light to the intelligent mind. How can you know truth but by its opposite, or light but by its opposite? The absence of light is darkness. How can sweetness be known but by its opposite, bitter? It is by this means that we obtain all intelligence.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourse 2:6-7 (October 23, 1853)
1850s

Truth , World , School , Way

“It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical behavior, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in the same measure as it is not used: one shakes off the dust of the school.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 22

Fate , Education , School , Behavior

“The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild.”

Kameron Hurley (1980) American writer

Source: God’s War (2011), Chapter 31 (p. 231).

World , Search , Water

“For me, the discovery of the outside-world, dates from my acquisition of a bicycle [c. 1892]. I spent whole days on the high-roads. I rode through villages, towns and the country-side. I tasted dust; rain poured down on me; I struggled against the wind. With my cycle I was able to visit places never dreamed of.... thanks to my bicycle I saw fort he first time the whole of the valley of the Seine from Chatou to Havre, Mantes, Bonnières, Rouen, Duyclair and Tancarville.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 46

World , Dreams , Time , Country

“Nowhere [in the book of Genesis] does it say that the serpent was supposed to be anything but a snake. In fact nearly all of the mainstream Christian depictions of the serpent show it as a woman, allegedly Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Talmudic legend. The earliest versions of this myth, like that found in the Epic of Gilgamesh also show it to be nothing more than “the serpent who could not be tamed”. The serpent could not have been Satan, because it was cursed to crawl on it’s belly and eat dust for all of it’s days. Yet the first time Satan appears in subsequent scripture is some time after this story, and Satan is God’s right-hand man then; there was never a fall-out between them. At no time is Satan ever reduced to crawling on his belly or eating dust or having his head bruised by women. There is a distinct difference in this story between the mythical character of Satan and the mythical origin of snakes.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, The Cow http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/01/22/the-cow/ (January 22, 2016)

Women , God , Books , Appearance

“The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the fourth book, "The Book of Impotence"
The Pillow Book

Life , Books , Time

“Yet there is no gainsaying but that it must have been somewhat sweeter in that dewy morning of creation, when it was young and fresh, when the feet of the tramping millions had not trodden its grass to dust, nor the din of the myriad cities chased the silence forever away. Life must have been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human race, walking hand in hand with God under the great sky. They lived in sunkissed tents amid the lowing herds. They took their simple wants from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled and talked and thought; and the great earth rolled around in stillness, not yet laden with trouble and wrong. Those days are past now. The quiet childhood of Humanity, spent in the far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers, is gone forever; and human life is deepening down to manhood amid tumult, doubt, and hope. Its age of restful peace is past. It has its work to finish and must hasten on. What that work may be—what this world's share is in the great design—we know not, though our unconscious hands are helping to accomplish it. Like the tiny coral insect working deep under the dark waters, we strive and struggle each for our own little ends, nor dream of the vast fabric we are building up for God.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love , Life , God , Age

“Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disk of eternity with a dollar, and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust.”

Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–1880) American priest

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 20.

Star

“In fifteen billion years did spirit out of less than dust evolve,” he said. “In fifteen billion more will not this universe of stars to less than dust return? Whence did it come? What is there when it is gone?”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 10 (p. 124)

Star , Universe

“Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“A mine was dug, and in two or three days the walls fell down, and the fort of Multan was taken. Six thousand warriors were put to death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves. Protection was given to the merchants, artisans and the agriculturists. Muhammad Kasim said the booty ought to be sent to the treasury of the Khalifa; but as the soldiers have taken so much pains, have suffered so many hardships, have hazarded their lives, and have been so long a time employed in digging the mine and carrying on the war, and as the fort is now taken, it is proper that the booty should be divided, and their dues given to the soldiers. Then all the great and principal inhabitants of the city assembled together, and silver to the weight of sixty thousand dirams was distributed and every horseman got a share of four hundred dirams weight. After this, Muhammad Kasim said that some plan should be devised for realizing the money to be sent to the Khalifa. He was pondering over this, when suddenly a Brahman came and said, 'Heathenism is now at an end, the temples are thrown down, the world has received the light of Islam, and mosques are built instead of idol temples. I have heard from the elders of Multan that in ancient times there was a chief in this city whose name was Jibawin, and who was a descendent of the Rai of Kashmir. He was a Brahman and a monk, he strictly followed his religion, and always occupied his time in worshipping idols. When his treasures exceeded all limits and computation, he made a reservoir on the eastern side of Multan, which was hundred yards square. In the middle of it he built a temple fifty yards square, and he made a chamber in which he concealed forty copper jars each of which was filled with African gold dust. A treasure of three hundred and thirty mans of gold was buried there. Over it there is an idol made of red gold, and trees are planted round the reservoir.'… It is related by historians, on the authority of… Ali bin Muhammad who had heard it from Abu Muhammad Hindui that Muhammad Kasim arose and with his counsellors, guards and attendants, went to the temple. He saw there an idol made of gold, and its two eye were bright red rubies… Muhammad Kasim ordered the idol to be taken up. Two hundred and thirty mans of gold were obtained, and forty jars filled with gold dust… This gold and the image were brought to treasury together with the gems and pearls and treasures which were obtained from the plunder of Multan.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Multan (Punjab) . The Chach Nama, in: Elliot and Dowson, Vol. I : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 205-06.
Quotes from The Chach Nama

Death , Money , Pain , War

“I think Prince was heads, hands and feet about all the rest of them, I thought he left (Michael) Jackson in the dust. Prince was way beyond that. But how pathetic that he killed himself. Don't kid yourself, that's what he did. Slowly, I'll grant you … but that's what drugs and alcohol is: a slow death.”

Gene Simmons (1949) Israeli-born American rock bass guitarist, singer-songwriter, record producer, entrepreneur, and actor

About Prince's death. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/gene-simmons-on-prince-how-pathetic-that-he-killed-himself-20160510 (May 10, 2016)

Death , Alcohol , Way , Thinking

“I’m not raising any kids to be radioactive dust.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 18, “Pioneer Party” (p. 198)

“He in the turning dust lay
mightily in his might, his horsemanship all forgotten.”

Homér Iliad

XVI. 775–776 (tr. R. Lattimore).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

“How my soul hates This language,
Which makes life itself a lie,
Flattering dust with eternity.”

George Gordon Byron Sardanapalus

Act I, scene 2.
Sardanapalus (1821)

Life , Hate , Lie , Soul

“Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. … In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion – both the master’s house and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried – a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Freedom Song (1998)

Bird , Tree , Light , Bee

“In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 4.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

Life , Youth , Sun , Dead

“One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

Business , Nature , Decision , Time

“I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here - me included - will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Seven

Imagination , Time

“Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.”

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) English Elizabethan pamphleteer and poet

Source: Summer's Last Will and Testament http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/summ1.htm (1600), lines 1590-1594.

“He said, 'The royal robe I wear
Trails all along the fields of light:
Its silent blue and silver bear
For gems the starry dust of night.'
'The breath of joy unceasingly
Waves to and fro its folds starlit,
And far beyond earth's misery
I live and breathe the joy of it.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Light , Joy , Night

“Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society. Nowhere will you find more company of a soothing peace-be-still kind. Your animal fellow beings, so seldom regarded in civilization, and every rock-brow and mountain, stream, and lake, and every plant soon come to be regarded as brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless winds. This one noble park is big enough and rich enough for a whole life of study and aesthetic enjoyment. It is good for everybody, no matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a mail of business habits like a tree with bark. None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

1895, page 350
John of the Mountains, 1938

Life , Peace , Beauty , Mountain

“This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image.”

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) writer and activist

The Creation, st. 11.
God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927)

God , Baby

“You'd be shiny and glossy and resist dust.”

Gina Barberi

Radio From Hell (October 10, 2005)

“I don’t know if people are meant to be together. You have to have a lot in common, choose well and be really fortunate. It’s not like you’re sprinkled with fairy dust. You have to believe that love will be there when you need it.”

Claire Danes (1979) American actress

In "I Needed A Connection That Was Real" by Dotson Rader in Parade magazine (2 October 2005) http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2005/edition_10-02-2005/featured_1

Love , People

“The dust and silence of the upper shelf.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Milton (1825)

Silence

“Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just!
Shining nowhere but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark!”

Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet

"They Are All Gone," st. 5.
Silex Scintillans (1655)

Death , Lie

“Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheel,
Less than the rust that never stained thy sword”

Laurence Hope India's Love Lyrics

Less Than the Dust
Indian Love Lyrics (aka Garden of Kama) (1901)

“There is no keeping down of veritie, but it wil spring and come out of dust and ashes, as appeared right well in this man. For though they digged vp his body, burnt his bones, & drowned his ashes, yet þe word of God and truth of his doctrine with the fruit & successe therof they could not burne.”

John Foxe (1516–1587) British historian

Bk. 5, p. 464
Acts and Monuments (1563)

God , Truth , Spring , Appearance

“…Carlo delivered what began as a panegyric and ended as an anathema…. His brother…regarded by the stupid and the wicked as a sort of imbecilic weakness, an infantile inability to come to terms with the sophisticated world of affairs. Because he was just he was to be seen as a quixotic madman, because he was virtuous he was to be taken for a eunuch, because he was magnanimous he was to be gulled and derided…. ‘There are many here today in this great modern temple of the Lord who have come not out of the piety of friendship or respect but following sickening forms of hypocritical convention, and among these are some that are soiled, bemerded, stinking with wealth amassed unjustly, wealth made out of torture and murder and the exploitation of human frailty, a precarious wealth as insubstantial as fairy gold, demon gold rather, that will crumble into dust at the dawn of the recovery of sanity and virtue by a great nation temporarily demented, an angelic land to its immigrants that is now set upon by the devils of greed, stupidity and madness…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Friendship , Stupidity , World , Angels

“To whom does this terrace belong? —
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust,
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs?
Not to me, but this lizard,
Older than I, or the cockroach.”

Theodore Roethke book The Far Field

"The Lizard," ll. 27-31
The Far Field (1964)

Bee , Sun

“Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe. A low growl of thunder echoed up the cavern of Fifth Avenue and I looked up to where the sky started at the seventy-first floor of the Empire State Building. I could smell the rain. It was the kind that hung above the orderly piles of concrete until it was soaked with dust and debris and when it came down it wasn't rain at all but the sweat of the city.”

Mickey Spillane book The Killing Man

The Killing Man (1989)

“All I can say is that I am well. I have the enemy closely hemmed in all round. My position is naturally strong and fortified against an attack from outside. I have been so strongly reinforced that Johnston will have to come with a mighty host to drive me away. I do not look upon the fall of Vicksburg as in the least doubtful. If, however, I could have carried the place on the 22nd of last month, I could by this time have made a campaign that would have made the State of Mississippi almost safe for a solitary horseman to ride over. As it is, the enemy have a large army in it, and the season has so far advanced that water will be difficult to find for an army marching, besides the dust and heat that must be encountered. The fall of Vicksburg now will only result in the opening of the Mississippi River and demoralization of the enemy. I intended more from it. I did my best, however, and looking back can see no blunder committed.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Letter http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/us-grants-letter-to-his-1.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/ to Jesse Root Grant (15 June 1863), Vicksburg
1860s

Nature , Strong , Water , Time

“People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful — very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Speech in Boston (2002)

God , People , World , Universe

“One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him;
The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow.
He sings of a house he lived in long ago.
It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in;
The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Singing , Housing

“God is a murderer, imagine that. I told you I had the best story in the Bible, didn't I? I have always known that He was. Sooner or later He murders us all, doesn't He, and we go back to the dust from which we came. So I'm no longer scared to defy him. All He can do is kill me.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

God , Imagination

“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 14

Life , Art , Time

“And I remembered the inside of that apartment, how it smelled of mice and dust, and the old women who sat in the lobby on hot afternoons, and the old woman with the pretty legs. Then there was the elevator man, a broken man from Milwaukee, who seemed to sneer every time you called your floor, as though you were such a fool for choosing that particular floor, the elevator man who always had a tray of sandwiches in the elevator, and a pulp magazine.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Women , Fools , Time

“How loved, how honored once, avails thee not,
To whom related, or by whom begot;
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be!”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 71.

Love , Art

“Men are made of the dust of the earth.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Men

“The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

p, 125
Jacques le Fataliste (1796)

Children , Change , Heart

“We can show the way. We can make dust -- or eat dust.”

Lawton Chiles (1930–1998) Chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging

State of the State address http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/d/x/dxd22/1993B.htm (2 February 1993)

Way

“Not long after his (Justinian) accession, he reaffirmed the penalties which previous Emperors had enacted against the pagans, and forbade all donations or legacies for the purpose of maintaining "Hellenic impiety,"… by making the profession of (Christian) orthodoxy a necessary condition for public teaching Justinian accelerated the extinction of "Hellenism."… This event had a curious sequel. Some of the philosophers whose occupation was gone resolved to cast the dust of the Christian Empire from their feet and migrate.”

J. B. Bury (1861–1927) Irish historian and freethinker

History of the Later Roman Empire,

Penalty

“There is another earthquake in Kyoto. We appreciate it lyrically. A slide of dust slips along a roof gully. A large tree of golden petals shakes and the petals drift to the floor. Birds fly up. Bottles of clear liquid in a shop quiver on a shelf. The water in a puddle shimmers reflections up a wall. A collection of grey roof tiles shift and -- ever faster -- begin to slide down a roof slope.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Section 56
8 1/2 Women

Bird , Tree , Water , Flying

“Rolf Halbritter coughed from the dust the retreating convoy kicked up. He shook his head in wonder not far from awe. The Amis were really and truly going- no, really and truly gone. Which meant… He had a badge pinned on the underside of his collar, where it didn't show. Now he could wear it openly agian. It was round, with a red outer ring that carried a legend in bronze letters: NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHE DEUTSCHE ARBEITERPARTEI. The white inner circle held a black swastika. Every Party member had one just like it. Pretty soon, they'd all be showing it, too.”

Harry Turtledove (1949) American novelist, short story author, essayist, historian

Source: The Man With the Iron Heart (2008), p. 528

“Turning, for them who pass, the common dust
Of servile opportunity to gold.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Desultory Stanza.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Tommy started to play the guitar and sing. He and I had trekked more than once downtown to the Folk Center to hear a barefoot hillbilly woman in a long, faded skirt intone Elizabethan songs and pluck at a dulcimer or to listen, frightened and transported, to a big black Lesbian with a crew cut moan her way through the blues. The People — those brawny, smiling farmers, those plump, wholesome teens bursting out of bib overalls, those toothless ex-cons, those white-eyed dust bowel victims — the People, half-glimpsed in old photos, films and WPA murals, were about to reemerge, we trusted, into history and our lives.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Five (p. 120).

People , Smile , Way , Photo

“An unbiased reader, on opening one of their [Fichte’s, Schelling’s or Hegel’s] books and then asking himself whether this is the tone of a thinker wanting to instruct or that of a charlatan wanting to impress, cannot be five minutes in any doubt. … The tone of calm investigation, which had characterized all previous philosophy, is exchanged for that of unshakeable certainty, such as is peculiar to charlatanry of every kind and at all times. … From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavor to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effect to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 23
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

Books , Time

“Well, if I were thus rationed in this article and could have but one adjective for George Gershwin, that adjective would be "ingenuous." Ingenuous at and about his piano. Once an occasional composer named Oscar Levant stood beside that piano while those sure, sinewy, catlike Gershwin fingers beat their brilliant drum-fire—the tumultuous cascade of the "Rhapsody In Blue," the amorous languor of "The Man I Love," the impish glee of "Fascinating Rhythm," the fine, jaunty, dust-spurning scorn of "Strike Up the Band." If the performer was familiar with the work of any other composer, he gave no evidence of it. Levant (who, by the way, makes a fleeting appearance in the new Dashlell Hammett book, under the guise of Levi Oscant) could be heard mutterIng under his breath, "An evening with Gershwin Is a Gershwln evening."
"I wonder," said our young composer dreamily, "if my music will be played a hundred years from now."
"It certainly will be," said the bitter Levant,"if you are still around."”

Alexander Woollcott (1887–1943) American critic

"George the Ingenuous" in Cosmopolitan (November 1933); reprinted in Ch. IV: "'...A Young Colossus...'" https://books.google.com/books?id=ATcjgQTx0uIC&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false from Gershwin Remembered (1992) by Edward Jablonski, pp. 44-45

Love , Books , Music , Way

“When they built you brother, they turned this dust to gold.
When they built you brother, they broke the mold.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Terry's Song"
Song lyrics, Magic (2007)

“Born in Lust, Turn to Dust. Born in Sin, Come on In”

Stephen King Storm of the Century

Storm of the Century (1999)

“A morning rain has settled the dust in Weicheng;
Willows are green again in the tavern dooryard…
Wait till we empty one more cup –
West of Yang Gate there'll be no old friends.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"A Song at Weicheng" (送元二使安西), as translated by Witter Bynner in Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty
Variant translations:
Wei City morning rain dampens the light dust.
By this inn, green, newly green willows.
I urge you to drink another cup of wine;
West of Yang Pass, are no old friends.
Mike O'Connor, "Wei City Song" in Where the World Does Not Follow (2002), p. 119
No dust is raised on pathways wet with morning rain,
The willows by the tavern look so fresh and green.
I invite you to drink a cup of wine again:
West of the Southern Pass no more friends will be seen.
Xu Yuan-zhong, "A Farewell Song" in 150 Tang Poems (1984), p. 29
Light rain is on the light dust.
The willows of the inn-yard
Will be going greener and greener,
But you, Sir, had better take wine ere your departure,
For you will have no friends about you
When you come to the gates of Go.
Ezra Pound, epigraph to "Four Poems of Departure", in Cathay (1915), p. 28

Waiting

“Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

A Peck of Gold (1926)

Life , Children

“[After]
Burnt to the dust, an ashy heap
Was every cottage round;—
I listened, but I could not hear
One single human sound:”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Glencoe from The London Literary Gazette (12th July 1823)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

“But ne'er the subject of your work proclaim
In its own colors and its genuine name;
Let it by distant tokens be conveyed,
And wrapped in other words, and covered in their shade.
At last the subject from the friendly shroud
Bursts out, and shines the brighter from the cloud;
Then the dissolving darkness breaks away,
And every object glares in open day.
Thus great Ulysses' toils were I to choose
For the main theme that should employ my Muse,
By his long labors of immortal fame
Should shine my hero, but conceal his name;
As one who, lost at sea, had nations seen,
And marked their towns, their manners, and their men,
Since Troy was leveled to the dust by Greece—
Till a few lines epitomized the piece.”
Jam vero cum rem propones, nomine nunquam Prodere conveniet manifesto: semper opertis Indiciis, longe et verborum ambage petita Significant, umbraque obducunt: inde tamen, ceu Sublustri e nebula, rerum tralucet imago Clarius, et certis datur omnia cernere signis. Hinc si dura mihi passus dicendus Ulysses, Non ilium vero memorabo nomine, sed qui Et mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes Naufragus, eversae post saeva incendia Trojae, Addam alia, angustis complectens omnia dictis.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566) Italian bishop

Book II, line 40
De Arte Poetica (1527)

Men , Color , Distant , Sea

“If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?…
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. … The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache … This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Interviewed by Eric Nordern, Playboy (September 1968)

Love , World , Religion , Star

“Oh Genius! fling aside thy starry crown,
Close up thy rainbow wings, and on thy head
Lay dust and ashes — for, this cold drear world
Is but thy prison-house. Alas for him
Who has thy dangerous gifts, for they are like
The fatal ones that evil spirits give, —
Bright and bewildering, leading unto death.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(26th July 1823) The Artist’s Studio
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Death , World , Evil , Housing

“Two small aisles on each side of this chapel present a touching instance of the equality of the grave; which brings down the oppressor to a level with the oppressed, and mingles the dust of the bitterest enemies together.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"Westminster Abbey".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

“Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), p. 160

World , Reality , Chance , Sea

“The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang — home-going. So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit — waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast — all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. 'Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

pages 439-440
("Trees towering … into eternity" are the next-to-last lines of the documentary film " John Muir in the New World http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1823/" (American Masters), produced, directed, and written by Catherine Tatge.)
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love , Life , Death , Law

“The crime is how we deliberately keep out of touch,
Pretending it has nothing to do with us…

How familiar the metaphors, we think, suspecting our
House servants of having killed & eaten our pet cats!

At the University, expatriate lecturers gesticulate,
Finger the leaves of Marx to a batch of yawning students,
Nervously trying to define something or other…

Colonies of storks in flamboyant trees look down on
The valley dust and the last of the sweet bananas.”

Jack Mapanje (1944) Malawian poet

"When the Shire Valley Dries Up Patiently"
The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993)

Cats , Thinking , Tree , Universe