"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

"Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning -- already gone --
thus should one regard one's self."
— Ikkyu

"Don't weep, insects --
Lovers, stars themselves,
Must part."
— Kobayashi Issa

"I spur my horse past the ruined city;
the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts:
ancient battlements, high and low;
old grave mounds, great and small.

Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed trembles
and the voice of the great trees clings forever,
I sigh over all these common bones --
No roll of the immortals bears their names. "
— Han-shan

"Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay."
— Basava (The lord of the meeting rivers: Devotional poems of Basavanna)

"Prophet may you be!
If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
when time is old and hath forgot itself,
when waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
and blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
and mighty states characterless are grated
to dusty nothing, yet let memory,
from false to false, among false maids in love,
upbraid my falsehood!"
— William Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida)