the sum of things remains the same

.

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old.
Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives.

In all creation, be assured, there is no death—no death, 
but only change and innovation; what we people call birth

is but a different new beginning; death is but 
to cease to be the same. 

Perhaps this may have moved to that and that to this,

yet still the sum of things remains the same.


—Pythagoras

Ovid, Metamorphoses
translation by A.D. Melville

.