Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.

In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.

All human things are subject to decay

The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.

the world is the mirror of myself dying.

I know that things can’t stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?

For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind, still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.

The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.

The myth of worldly decline can seem old-fashioned, darkly pessimistic, and deeply discouraging when compared to the tales of upward evolution and unending progress. Yet this world is essentially a place of mystery and what looks darkest at the beginning can have bright threads hidden within. Conversely, things that seem most positive can be found to have a dark shadow that eventually comes to the light of day and obscures what seemed so bright to begin with.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

This I tell you: decay is inherent in all conditioned things. Work out your own salvation, with diligence.

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.