Source identified
“There is no life like Spring-life born to die.”
Rossetti places renewal beside mortality in the same phrase, making seasonal beauty meaningful partly because its new life is temporary.
Source note: “Spring,” Project Gutenberg #16950. This is a lyric reflection on transience, not a literal biological generalization about all life.
Source identified
“Let the dead Past bury its dead!”
The poem rejects living backward and immediately redirects attention toward action available in the present.
Source note: A Psalm of Life, in the stanza beginning “Trust no Future.”
Source identified
“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”
Instead of measuring autumn only against spring, the poem redirects attention to the distinct music of the season that is actually present.
Source note: “To Autumn,” final stanza, in Keats: Poems Published in 1820; Project Gutenberg #23684. The line follows the question “Where are the songs of Spring?” and answers by valuing autumn’s own sounds.
Source identified
“The universe is transformation: life is opinion.”
Change is treated as the condition of the world, while our experience of life is shaped by judgment.
Source note: Meditations, Book IV, in George Long’s translation.
Source identified
“The future is no more uncertain than the present.”
Whitman refuses to treat the future as uniquely unknowable: within the poem's larger meditation on what endures, present conditions are themselves unstable and changing, so uncertainty belongs to both horizons.
Source note: Leaves of Grass (1882), “Song of the Broad-Axe,” section 4; Wikisource 1882 transcription. The line appears after “And the dead advance as much as the living advance” and before Whitman turns from institutions and structures toward the personal qualities he says endure.
Source identified
“In a world where all is fleeting, change alone endures.”
Stability is temporary, so practical judgment requires expecting change rather than treating present arrangements as permanent.
Source note: Counsels and Maxims, T. Bailey Saunders translation, in a discussion of fortune and apparent stability.