Cycles Quotes

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind.

Time was not passing...it was turning in a circle.

The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral.

Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.

If you go into what I call a bubble boom, every bubble bursts.

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.

All things fall and are built again,And those that build them again are gay.

Old & New put their stamp to everything in Nature. The snowflake that is now falling is marked by both. The present moment gives the motion & the color of the flake: Antiquity, its form & properties. All things wear a luster which is the gift of the present & a tarnish of time.

All things arise in unison. Thereby we see their return.

This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.

To be worn out is to be renewed.

Misfortune is the root of good fortune; good fortune gives birth to misfortune.

In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.

Observe how endings become beginnings.

The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses.

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.

A gardener's work is never at an end; it begins with the year and continues to the next.

Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt!Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth!Smile, for your lover comes!

An age is the reversal of an age:When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,We lived like men that watch a painted stage.What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:It had not touched our lives.

There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

In Winter the bare boughs that seem to sleep Work covertly, preparing for their Spring.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring.

The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.

It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline.

The end of being is to know; and if you say, the end of knowledge is action,-why, yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge.

In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke their tender limbs.

I noticed, as I had done before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. Nature is thus merciful. But apparently they need rest as well as we.

I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.

Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure.

Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces-and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.

The lord is the peasant that was,The peasant is the lord that shall be.

Nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness; now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. Some green she thinks so good for our eyes that, like blue, she never banishes it entirely from our eyes, but has created evergreens.

Things are always at their best in their beginning.

What was scattered, gathers.What was gathered, blows away

Things exalted then decay. This is going against the Way. What goes against the Way meets an early end.

Death belongs to life as birth does The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down

The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course.

You can remember, a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones.

Course, that's the trouble with politics, it breeds politics! So that makes it pretty hard to stamp out.

What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.

That which shrinks must first expand.

Few, if any, creatures are equally active all night.

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.

The earth paints a portrait of the sun at dawn with sunflowers in bloom. Unhappy with the portrait, she erases it and paints it again and again.

The night crept on apace, the moon went down, the stars grew pale and dim, and morning, cold as they, slowly approached. Then, from behind a distant hill, the noble sun rose up, driving the mists in phantom shapes before it, and clearing the earth of their ghostly forms till darkness came again.

All things are the same, familiar in enterprise, momentary in endurance, coarse in substance. All things now are as they were in the day of those whom we have buried.

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced.

A tree there is that from its topmost boughIs half all glittering flame and half all greenAbounding foliage moistened with the dew;And half is half and yet is all the scene;And half and half consume what they renew.

It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea.

So then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more, thank God! to its most charming chapter. The violets and the Mayflowers are as its inscriptions or vignettes. It always makes a pleasant impression on us, when we open again at these pages of the book of life.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

All that happens is as usual and familiar as the rose in spring and the crop in summer.

The first pleasant days of spring come out like a squirrel and go in again.