Perishable Quotes & Sayings

It's like the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy, or anyone who delights in anything ephemeral. The charm in a bottle of wine, the craft, all the work that goes into it . . . actually delighting in the fact that it's perishable and goes away I find really helpful. I've gotten a lot of miles out of a beautiful bottle of wine, not just for the taste and the buzz, but the symbolism of delighting in something that goes away. — Timothy Ferriss

Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success. — Vanessa Redgrave

to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. — G.K. Chesterton

To make possible the subjection of eternal, spiritual organized intelligences to perishable, material structures, certain natural laws would naturally be brought into operation. From the point of view of the eternal spirit, it might mean the breaking of a law directed towards eternal life; yet to secure the desired contact with matter, the spirit was compelled to violate the law. Thus, in this earth life, a man who desires to acquire a first hand acquaintance with magnetism and electricity, may subject himself to all kinds of electric shocks, that, perhaps, will affect his body injuriously; yet, for the sake of securing the experience, he may be willing to do it. Adam, the first man, so used natural laws that his eternal, spiritual body became clothed upon with an earthly body, subject to death. Then in begetting children, he was able to produce earthly bodies for the waiting spirits. According — John Andreas Widtsoe

For a country without a past is nothing, a word That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning, A perishable wall destroyed by flame, An echo of animal emotions. — Czeslaw Milosz

When something you use again and again is on sale, take advantage. This strategy doesn't apply to perishable items, and you don't want to buy so much more than you need just to get a deal, but if you know you're going to use a product eventually, it pays to take advantage of the cheaper price. — Jean Chatzky

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims
these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
And we certainly wouldn't write about it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Yellow leaves were falling all through the forest and the river was filled with them, shuttling and winking, golden leaves that rushed like poured coins in the tailwater. A perishable currency, forever renewed. — Cormac McCarthy

My friend, you see how perishable are the riches of this world; there is nothing solid but virtue, — Voltaire

Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one's fatherland, which is perishable? — Denis Diderot

The private buildings [of Virginia] are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greatest proportion being of scantlingand boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable. — Thomas Jefferson

I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me. — Charlotte Bronte

I no longer take pleasure in perishable food or in the delights of this world. I want only God's bread, which is the Flesh of Jesus Christ, formed of the seed of David, and for drink I crave His Blood which is love that cannot perish. — Ignatius Of Antioch

That is sacred which in the first place is attached to the transcendent order, secondly, possesses the character of absolute certainty and, thirdly, eludes the comprehension and power of investigation of the ordinary human mind ... The sacred is the presence of the centre in the periphery, of the motionless in the moving; dignity is essentially an expression of it, for in dignity too the centre manifests at the exterior; the heart is revealed in gestures. The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity. — Frithjof Schuon

Perishable, It Said
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
And below, in different ink,
The date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking;
Now at the back of each hand,
Now inside the knees,
Now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
Then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
Hunger, sorrow, fears-
These too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.
How suddenly then
The strange happiness took me,
Like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
Inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings. — Jane Hirshfield

I have learnt that a good marriage is healing for the soul, something to relish. But a bad marriage is long-suffering, a thing to be endured. The only good thing about marriage is that it's perishable like human life. — Meghna Pant

You say that imperishable happiness lies elsewhere. Tell me about this 'elsewhere.'" "I only know that it does not lie in perishable objects. It lies not outside but within. It is the mind that determines what is fearful, worthless, desirable, or priceless, and therefore it is the mind, and only the mind, that must be altered." "What — Irvin D. Yalom

Tactics are great, but tactics become commoditized." TF: If you understand principles, you can create tactics. If you are dependent on perishable tactics, you are always at a disadvantage. This is why Ramit studies behavioral psychology and the elements of persuasion that appear hardwired. — Timothy Ferriss

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective. — Errol Morris

Stock up your pantry and your freezer with things that aren't perishable: Your favorite jar of tomato sauce that lists 'tomato' as the first ingredient, lots of grains, olive oils, vinegars, tomato pastes, onions, shallots. When you go to the store, you only have to pick up meats and produce. — Giada De Laurentiis

I think films are perishable, because they depend too much on technology, which advances too quickly and the films become old-fashioned, antiques. What I hope for is that technology advances to the point that films in the future will depend on a little pill which you take; then you sit in the dark, and from your eyes you project the film you want to see on a blank wall. — Luis Bunuel

Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable. — Andre Maurois

True self-reliance does not mean reliance on one's physical strength; it means reliance on something mightier, something which is less perishable ... It means trusting in the spiritual. — Swami Paramananda

Knowing the limitations of the native syllabry as a literary medium, the student cannot accept without qualification the usual explanation that the friars destroyed the relics of paganism among their converts, or that the literature was recorded on highly perishable materials which disintegrated before scholars could get a hold of them — Bienvenido L. Lumbera

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Employees who are not engaged have untapped potential that sours like a perishable item. — Kevin E. Phillips

What, but the rapacity of the only men who exercised their reason, the priests, secured such vast property to the church, when a man gave his perishable substance to save himself from the dark torments of purgatory. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He — Herman Melville

In itself it is nothing. Nothing but a book: parchment, colouring, ink. Yet the most perishable material is at the same time the most durable substance in the world ... — Lion Feuchtwanger

Civilization is a perishable commodity. — Helen Clark MacInnes

The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things. — Henri Frederic Amiel

Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions. — John Randolph

Unload your perishable and empty boxes. Give away old clothes and broken cookware. Crush the empty cans and load them with the yellow newspapers. Shred the sensitive documents. Discard fingernail clippings. Get rid of those photograph and letters. Offload the old enemies. A lighter life, at any price. — Amelia Gray

These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers. — Robert Charles Wilson

Reading Myself
Like thousands I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire
somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus ...
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work live long
enough for the sweet tooth bear to desecrate
this open book..my open coffin — Robert Lowell

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years ... I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside. — Rick Bragg

24Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives s the prize? So t run that you may obtain it. 25Every u athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we v an imperishable. 26So I do not run aimlessly; I w do not box as one x beating the air. 27But I discipline my body and y keep it under control, [2] lest after preaching to others z I myself should be a disqualified. — Anonymous

Wine is a successful effort to translate the perishable into the permanent. — John Arlott

If we argue that since all bodies are perishable, one may kill, does it follow that I may kill all the women and children in the Ashram? Would I have in doing so acted according to the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, merely because their bodies are perishable? What, — Mahatma Gandhi

And if one loves me for my judgement, memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this Ego, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities.
Let us, then, jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities. — Blaise Pascal

The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it's an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn't notice you noticed at all. — Lynda Barry

Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that "all things everywhere are perishable. — William B. Irvine

They tell us that plants are not like man immortal, but are perishable-soul -less. I think that is something that we know exactly nothing about. — John Muir

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to extreme old age. — Henry David Thoreau

Our bodies are perishable, wealth is not at all permanent and death is always nearby. Therefore we must immediately engage in acts of merit. — Chanakya

My father was a painter, so I was encouraged to take a sketchbook everywhere. Cameras are perishable, but I still have tonnes of sketchbooks from all the trips I've ever been on. It gets you by when you don't know what to give people as a gift; drawings are good souvenirs. — Jane Birkin

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified. — Nikola Tesla

The unvarnished truth is that a trained dog is a perishable commodity. Few things are so subject to deterioration. It is almost as hard-and it takes almost as good a hunter-to keep a dog good as to make one as good. Eternal vigilance is the price of a good bird dog, regardless of who you are, or where and how virtuously you live. — Havilah Babcock

We have no evidence as yet about mind or the power to think; it seems to be a widely different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers. — Aristotle.

The individual is identified with the perishable; what can become eternal in the individual pertains exclusively to the separate and unique active Intelligence. — Henry Corbin

The Eucharist is source and pledge of blessedness and glory, not for the soul alone, but for the body also ... In the frail and perishable body that divine Host, which is the immortal body of Christ, implants a principle of resurrection, a seed of immortality, which one day must germinate — Pope Leo XIII

Each one, then, should love his life, even though it be not very attractive, for it is the only life. It is a boon that will never return and that each person should tend and enjoy with care; it is one's capital, large or small, and can not be treated as an investment like those whose dividends are payable through eternity. Life is an annuity; nothing is more certain than that. So that all efforts are to be respected that tend to ameliorate the tenure of this perishable possession which, at the end of every day, has already lost a little of its value. Eternity, the bait by which simple folk are still lured, is not situated beyond life, but in life itself, and is divided among all men, all creatures. Each of us holds but a small portion of it, but that share is so precious that it suffices to enrich the poorest. Let us then take the bitter and the sweet in confidence, and when the fall of the days seems to whirl about us, let us remember that dusk is also dawn. — Remy De Gourmont

God never intended His Church to be a refrigerator in which to preserve perishable piety. He intended it to be an incubator in which to hatch out converts. - F. LINCICOME — Leonard Ravenhill

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity. — Herman Melville

All of us have mortal bodies, composed of perishable matter, but the soul lives forever: it is a portion of the Deity housed in our bodies — Josephus

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. — Susan Sontag

Evil is ... a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world — Marquis De Sade

Success and excellence are not the same. Excellence grows within a person, is largely within that person's control, and its meaning lasts. Success is measured externally, by comparison to others, is often outside our control, and is perishable. — Joe Paterno

Know verily that the purpose underlying all these symbolic terms and abstruse allusions, which emanate from the revealers of Gods holy cause, hath been to test and prove the peoples of the world; that thereby the earth of the pure and illuminated hearts may be known from the perishable and barren soil. — Baha'u'llah

Hearty faith is indispensable for man, because the light of our intellect is very limited, and cannot contain much mental light, while the Lord our God is Infinite Light, and the world is an abyss of His omnipotence and wisdom, whilst in us there is only, so to say, a drop of His power and wisdom, because only so much, and not more, can be contained of them in our perishable flesh. — John Of Kronstadt

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with. — Ovid

There are many people, particularly in sports, who think that success and excellence are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Excellence is something that is lasting and dependable and largely within a person's control. In contrast, success is perishable and is often outside our control. If you strive for excellence, you will probably be successful eventually. People who put excellence in the first place have the patience to end up with success. An additional burden for the victim of the success mentality is that he is threatened by the success of others and he resents real excellence. In contrast, the person that is fascinated by quality is excited when he sees it in others. — Joe Paterno

But nothing is yet clear on the subject of the intellect and the contemplative faculty. However, it seems to be another kind of soul, and this alone admits of being separated, as that which is eternal from that which is perishable, while it is clear from these remarks that the other parts of the soul are not separable, as some assert them to be, though it is obvious that they are conceptually distinct. — Aristotle.

We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what makes up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person's soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore we never love anyone, but only qualities. — Blaise Pascal

Time has a way of reminding us of its perishable nature in the retrospect of our reflections. — Gary Westfal

< ... > [Rainer Maria Rilke] speaks of absorbing Earth's phenomena with the full frenzy of human relish and insight as our destiny: It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again ... We are the bees of the invisible ... [Our work is] the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature. — Diane Ackerman

Men spend their life down here in the worship of petty (or mean) interests and the search of perishable things, and with that ("et avec cela", Fr.) they pretend to perpetuate for all eternity their self ("moi", Fr.) so hardly worthy ("digne", Fr.) of it. — African Spir

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone - crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions - one has to live with them, and we try. — Ekaterina Sedia

Every soul is wretched that becomes bound in friendship to perishable things. The soul is torn apart when the thing loved is lost. The wretchedness was perhaps always there, masked by the beloved thing that has been stripped away. — Augustine Of Hippo

You cannot see That which is the Seer of seeing; you cannot hear That which is the Hearer of hearing; you cannot think of That which is the Thinker of thought; you cannot know That which is the Knower of knowledge. This is your Self, that is within all; everything else but This is perishable. — Anonymous

There are many worlds and many systems of Universes existing all at the same time, all of them perishable. — Anaximander

No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing ... Yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it? How comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it? The ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. The musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes. — Henry David Thoreau

Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself. — Jonathan Kozol

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. — Joan Didion

I don't accept flowers. I take nothing perishable. — Paulette Goddard

We too often satisfy ourselves with the perishable things of time, forgetting the opportunities we have of developing within us the great, the eternal principles of life and truth. The Lord wishes to establish a closer and more intimate relationship between Himself and us; He wishes to elevate us in the scale of being and intelligence, and this can only be done through the medium of the everlasting Gospel which is specially prepared for this purpose. — Lorenzo Snow

Many wild foods have their charms, but the dearest one to my heart - my favorite fruit in the whole world - is the thimbleberry. Imagine the sweetest strawberry you've ever tasted, crossed with the tartest raspberry you've ever eaten. Give in the texture of silk velvet and make it melt to sweet juice the moment it hints your tongue. Shape it like the age-old sewing accessory that gives the fruit its name, and make it just big enough to cup a dainty fingertip. That delicious jewel of a fruit is a thimbleberry. They're too fragile to ship and too perishable to store, so they are one of those few precious things in life that can't be commoditized, and for me they always symbolize the essence of grabbing joy while I can. When it rains in thimbleberry season, the delicate berries get so damp that even the gentlest pressure crushes them, so instead of bringing them home as mush, I lick each one of my fingers as soon as it is picked. These sweet berries are treasure beyond price... — Sarah A. Chrisman

Said Candide to Cacambo:
My friend, you see how perishable are the riches of this world; there is nothing solid but virtue, and the happiness of seeing Cunegonde once more. — Voltaire

As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. — Ernst Haeckel

Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government, and earthly despotism would be the absolute perfect earthly government if the conditions were the same; namely the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual; but as a perishable, perfect man must die and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible. — Mark Twain

Do not the angels differs from us in this respect, that they do not want so many things as we do? Therefore the less we need, the more we are on our way to them; the more we need, the more we sink down to this perishable life. — Saint John Chrysostom

We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again "invisibly," inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even. — Sue Monk Kidd

The Mesh is about creating and managing what's perishable. It provides businesses with the ability to reach an audience of one, at a precise time. — Lisa Gansky

In this we see the wondrous virtue of the Lord: that the power dwelling in His body should communicate to perishable things the efficacy to heal, and that the divine activity should issue forth even from the hem of His garment. For God is not perceptible by the senses, to be enclosed within a body. The assumption of a body did not limit the nature of His power; but for our redemption His power took upon it the frailty of our body. — Hilary Of Poitiers

That which is external, it is instrumental (naimitik); it is relative and it is perishable [destructive]. Instrumental means no one has a say in it. One's actions are not of his own free will; he is under the control of external power. So on what basis do you need to object? Sooner or later you will have to become free from objections. — Dada Bhagwan

Just because a guy wanders through the produce aisle, isn't wearing a wedding band and lets you have the last ripe avocado, it doesn't mean he's single. It also doesn't mean you should fix him up with your best friend. His presence in the fresh produce section should've been the giveaway. Bachelors don't tend to buy perishable items." - Amanda in "A Deal with the Devil — Abby Matisse

Man, as a spiritual being, cannot be maintained in strength, uprightness, and peace except if he periodically withdraw himself from the outer world of perishable things and reach inwardly towards the abiding and imperishable realities. — James Allen

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. — Marilynne Robinson

Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream. — Mary Wollstonecraft

All perishable is but an allegory. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Good intentions are very mortal and perishable things. Like very mellow and choice fruit, they are difficult to keep. — Charles Simmons

Everything is temporary. There is nothing in the world that is not perishable. Therefore, treasure and honor all that you have in this moment, for in the next, it may be gone. — Karlyle Tomms

I am not the perishable body, but the eternal Self. — Ramana Maharshi

As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights ... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper. — Margaret Bourke-White

For immediately in the beginning, after his original life of blessedness, the first man despised the command of God, and fell into this mortal and perishable state, and exchanged his former divinely inspired luxury for this curse-laden earth. His descendants having filled our earth, showed themselves much worse, with the exception of one here and there, and entered upon a certain brutal and insupportable mode of life. — Eusebius

The temperature of my blood dropped several degrees, and I took a step back. My heart quickened. "Storm?" I prompted, looking at the boxes on the dock labeled "non-perishable. — Kirby Howell

I realize I had to learn ... to stop chasing the perishable prizes of this earth ... and give my best effort unto God and trust Him with the results. — Jeremy Lin

I live about 60 miles northwest of New York City, and whenever there's news of a big snowstorm coming, everyone runs for the store. The perishable items are usually the first things to go, which doesn't make sense because they perish. — Susan Beth Pfeffer