Quotes About Ephemerality

It passes, but it does not pass away.

There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime - a whole word for just being sad - about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die.

The loves and hours of the life of a man, They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.

Within an atom there can be a billion kingdoms, endless. But all of them are bound by the cycle of birth and death. They all come into being for a while and then vanish.

A brief life burns brightly.

In a thousand years, Fred, no one will even know or care we existed.

Man has here two and a half minutes-one to smile, one to sigh, and a half to love: for in the midst of this minute he dies.

Il tempo è ciò in grazia del quale ogni cosa, in ogni momento, diventa nulla nelle nostre mani.

Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth's barrier.

Nobody ever told me that motherhood was temporary. You think you have years and years with them, but the truth is, you don't.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life. It was almost as if a secret had passed between them. Was this some kind of love? I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness. I wanted to whisper to them: 'This is it. This is it'.

Enjoy life, because quick as the wind blows in, it disappears the same way, what I'm hinting at, just like our lives on earth, we appear; and we also depart.

The initial delight of being spotted lasts about a week and four days.

il tempo è fuggito tanto velocemente che l'animo non è riuscito ad invecchiare.

Ferma, ferma!" si vorrebbe gridare, ma si capisce ch'è inutile. Tutto fugge via, gli uomini, le stagioni, le nubi; e non serve aggrapparsi alle pietre, resistere in cima a qualche scoglio, le dita stanche si aprono, le braccia si afflosciano inerti, si è trascinati ancora nel fiume, che pare lento ma non si ferma mai.

There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.

When you lose you lose forever, an when you win it only lasts a second or two.

Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.

All life is dying life – including the life of God.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

You know how little while we have to stay, And, once departed, may return no more.

I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the thing that we hold in memory