Faded the flower and all its budded charms, — Mortality

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

"O Charidas, what of the underworld?" "Great darkness." "And what of the resurrection?" "A lie." "And Pluto?" "A fable; we perish utterly."

"You mortals are so obtuse! Why do you persist in believing that life and death are such static and rigid concepts? Why I can take your life and give it back to you again with the snap of a finger!"

"Again, bhikkhus, as though he were to see a corpse thrown aside in a charnel ground, one, two, or three days dead, bloated, livid, and oozing matter, a bhikkhu compares this same body with it thus: This body too is of the same nature, it will be like that, it is not exempt from that fate."

"Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:— We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf."

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away". How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depth of affliction!"