Quotes About Ephemerality

The plastic surgeon's knife slashes at time, which may seem to retreat, but then keeps on coming.

Time is but a phantom dagger That motion lifts to slay itself.

Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

On a que le temps pour aimer et pas un instant de plus.

She let herself love me for three minutes. Can three minutes last forever? I ask myself, but already know the answer. Probably not, I reply. But maybe they last long enough.

Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.

Even as the awareness was speaking itself to her mind it was gone, beyond her grasp, beyond recall. A little flash of heaven, which was a something or a state of being beyond either place or time or the ability to be expressed in words and was therefore to be sensed fleetingly but never to be grasped.

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past.

Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.

That which has been exists no more; it exists as little as that which has never been.

No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it. The present always exists, together with its content. Both remain fixed without wavering, like the rainbow on the waterfall.

Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly: for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort.

Come nel tempo ciascun attimo esiste solo in quanto ha cancellato l'attimo precedente - suo padre - per venire anch'esso con la medesima rapidità alla sua volta cancellato; come passato e avvenire (facendo astrazione dalle conseguenze del loro contenuto) sono illusori a modo di sogni, e il presente non è che un limite tra quelli, privo di estensione e durata: proprio così riconosceremo la stessa nullità anche in tutte le altre forme del principio di ragione.

All that on earth hath life and breath To earth must fall before his spear, And sorrow, saved alone from death, Inscribes above the mighty bier. Vanity, all is vanity. Yes

Like socks in a dryer, it had vanished into the ether.

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.

But nothin lasts, I guess. Only the love of the Lord.

Life is merely a series of moments and is in fact an unflinching serial killer, since it kills steadily each moment one after the other. Memory is the only survivor. ("Just for a moment")

Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.

Not every good thing in life will remain forever