When you gaze upon riches, they are gone, for they surely make wings for themselves, and fly off into the sky like an eagle!

What exists now is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing truly new on earth.

Yet when I reflected on everything I had accomplished and on all the effort that I had expended to accomplish it, I concluded: “All these achievements and possessions are ultimately profitless – like chasing the wind! There is nothing gained from them on earth.”

When a sentence is not executed at once against a crime, the human heart is encouraged to do evil.

Whatever you find to do with your hands, do it with all your might, because there is neither work nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, the place where you will eventually go.

He built a hedge around it, removed its stones, and planted a vine. He built a tower in the middle of it, and constructed a winepress. He waited for it to produce edible grapes, but it produced sour ones instead.

You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool – but you did not trust in the one who made it; you did not depend on the one who formed it long ago!

Your thinking is perverse! Should the potter be regarded as clay? Should the thing made say about its maker, “He didn’t make me”? Or should the pottery say about the potter, “He doesn’t understand”?

A carpenter takes measurements; he marks out an outline of its form; he scrapes it with chisels, and marks it with a compass. He patterns it after the human form, like a well-built human being, and puts it in a shrine.

I am the one who forms light and creates darkness; the one who brings about peace and creates calamity. I am the Lord, who accomplishes all these things.

who announces the end from the beginning and reveals beforehand what has not yet occurred, who says, ‘My plan will be realized, I will accomplish what I desire,’

The people who do this will be blessed, the people who commit themselves to obedience, who observe the Sabbath and do not defile it, who refrain from doing anything that is wrong.

You must change the way you have been living and do what is right. You must treat one another fairly.

So I will destroy this temple which I have claimed as my own, this temple that you are trusting to protect you. I will destroy this place that I gave to you and your ancestors, just like I destroyed Shiloh.

“Find Jeremiah and look out for him. Do not do anything to harm him, but do with him whatever he tells you.”

Then you will know that I am the Lord, whose statutes you have not followed and whose regulations you have not carried out. Instead you have behaved according to the regulations of the nations around you!’”

Indeed! If it was not made into anything useful when it was whole, how much less can it be made into anything when the fire has burned it up and it is charred?

As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, your sister Sodom and her daughters never behaved as wickedly as you and your daughters have behaved.

“‘For this is what the sovereign Lord says: I will deal with you according to what you have done when you despised your oath by breaking your covenant.

“But suppose he in turn has a son who notices all the sins his father commits, considers them, and does not follow his father’s example.