Quotes About Fragility

Said Father Basil: "Saint Benedict takes the image that Scripture uses to speak about Christ himself. 'A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not quench.' Humanity is already fragile. We need to treat it with care, with concern, with delicacy.

distant as the death of grocery chickens.

Only in the tamed trembling of a poem, I had believed Some kindness might survive

inertia did not grip her. She hid her fragility as best she could. Children

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

Duygularda korkunç bir ölümlülük var.

It is always pathetic to watch the efforts a man makes to cling to a straw, especially when one is oneself the straw.

She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because she was afraid that something 'would' happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, 'would not' happen.

It's not that we have to quit this life one day, it's how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!

Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies.

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

It's only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realize how often they burst into flames.

Don't imagine that our world can't collapse: there is nothing inevitable about progress or peace, and the global and national social and political order we inhabit today is no more immune from catastrophe than the pre–World War II order.

The more humans have mastered the world, the more it has taken on the taint of our own mortality. The world no longer seems deathless.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance.

I close my eyes and listen to the roar and clatter of the world as it rushes by. We are rushing too. The wind is whipping past us. We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don't know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

I'd been a snowflake. Without my specialness, I melted," she says.

For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain?

A village, even a small one, takes at least all night to burn, in the end it looks like an enormous flower, then there's only a bud, and after that nothing.

you've probably noticed that after the first half-century practically everybody gets leaky, they can't keep it in ... hence the cruelty of long drawn-out meals and drinking sessions ... ships and apartment houses are the same ... everything starts to leak ... sphincters, bladders, drain pipes, bowels ... the half-century is merciless for ladies and gentlemen ... worse for dogs and cats! ... with them it comes sooner! ... five ... six years ...

Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment.

Être brave avec son corps ? Demandez alors à l'asticot aussi d'être brave, il est rose et pâle et mou, tout comme nous.

We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion.

How incredible it is that in this fragile existence, we should hate and destroy one another.