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Quotes of the Day for 25 February 2004 - Dust and Ashes

I've been irritated recently, hearing about "Mardi Gras" celebrations taking place as long as ten days ago, and some scheduled for this next weekend. Somehow celebrating an event called Fat Tuesday on a Saturday is as disgusting as trying to move Christmas or the Fourth of July to a Monday. I trust you knew better and concluded your partying yesterday. Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Christians around the world will gather, including many who celebrated so diligently yesterday, to observe the change of the season. The faithful will approach their priest or pastor who will say "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" while making the sign of the cross in black ashes on each person's forehead.

Yet after brick and steel and stone are gone, and flesh and blood are dust, the dream lives on.
     - Anderson H. Scruggs

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.
     - C. V. Wedgwood

I've lived to bury my desires,
And see my dreams corrode with rust;
Now all that's left are fruitless fires
That burn my empty heart to dust.
     - Aleksandr Sergeyevick Pushkin, 1799 - 1837

You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!
     - Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 - 1900

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man: yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hair’s breadth of time assigned to thee live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
     - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It is the time we have now, and all our wasted time sinks into the sea and is swallowed up without a trace. The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future.
     - John Ashbery, The System

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