Nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again, Nor habitations long their names retain, But in oblivion to the final day remain.
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Time hath a wallet at his back, wherein he puts. Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster of ingratitudes.
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Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace! Let my memory be left in oblivion, my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character.
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Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.
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Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
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When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid, Siftings on siftings in oblivion,...
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As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land but the fame that comes after is oblivion.
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Life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.
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The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
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A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
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That's the whole thing with the hog. It's you and 80 wild horses under your butt, just sitting on 10 square inches where the rubber meets the road. That hurricane gale wind whipping you in the face, leaning into a curve you can feel that gravity wanting to suck you down into it and what do you do Give it a little more gas. Pure centrifugal force. You can see yourself hurtling ass end over teakettle into oblivion.
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Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred --it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the dropsy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust --the finer and more ethereal part mounts with winged spirit to watch over our latest memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.
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Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to heaven if you die dumb. Become better informed. Lean from others' mistakes. You could not live long enough to make them all yourself.
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The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
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All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.
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Beware of too much laughter, for it deadens the mind and produces oblivion.
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The end will come quickly, my love. There is a pain beyond pain, an agony so intense it shocks the mind into instant oblivion. We'll find immo...
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That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything
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Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.
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How frequently are the honesty and integrity of a man disposed of by a smile or a shrug. How many good and generous actions have been sunk into oblivion by a distrustful look, or stamped with the imputation of bad motives, by a mysterious and seasonable whisper!
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And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
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Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
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We were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble.
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Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
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It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.
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The reason death sticks so closely to llife isn't biological necessity- it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs as what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
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Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
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Last scene of all, That ends this strange, eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
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The stream of thought flows on but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
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