A fence lasts three years, a dog lasts three fences, a horse three dogs, and a man three horses.
Time and tide wait for no man.
The flowers in the garden bloom and thank, but we still love life, The air, the dusts and the microbes float in the sky at the breath of the wind. Little learning does not come up to great learning; the short-lived does not come up to the long-lived. How do we know that this is the case? The fungi that sprout in the morning and die before evening do not know the alteration of night and day; cicadas do not know the alteration of spring and autumn. Those are cases of the short-lived. In the south of the state of Chu there is a miraculous tortoise, for whom each spring or autumn lasts 500 years; in the remote ages there was a huge toom tree, for which each spring and autumn lasted 8,000 years. Those are cases of the long-lived.
