Quotes About Ephemerality

Time has a savage way of gnawing away at life, leaving it transitory and incomplete, so that life in its fullness can never be enjoyed by any temporal being.

Some say this evanescence helps focus our attention. They claim that we listen more closely when we know we only have one chance, one fleeting moment to grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened.

I love the passing of time.

It was very fast, that first time. They were on the couch, and then they were off the couch and it was all over. It was like jumping out the window and landing on the street. A quick ride, just like that.

Bisognerebbe chiarire una volta per tutte perché "un momento brutto" può andare avanti per mesi, mentre un momento di grazia dura sempre e soltanto un momento.

Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po, deep into the cool and dark of orchards, and there they had kissed with the sadness of newlyweds who know that their kisses are too poignantly tender and that their good fortune is subject, like all things, to the crush of time, which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful.

That fire you see can't last. Still, as it burns, it lights everything.

Yeah and it's over before you know it It all goes by so fast Yeah the bad nights take forever And the good nights don't ever seem to last

... I could have said something profound, but you would have forgotten it in 15 minutes - which is the afterlife of a graduation speech.

Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.

Happiness is like a butterfly.

Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, they have had what they wanted.

Happiness is indeed a Eurydice, vanishing as soon as gazed upon. It can exist only in acceptance, and succumbs as soon as it is laid claim to.

Terrestrial happiness is of short duration. The brightness of the flame is wasting its fuel; the fragrant flower is passing away in its own odors.

The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.

It's hard to imagine, seeing all of us breathing yet one day each of us shall be gone, leaving memories.

There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.

An inch of time on the sundial is worth more than a foot of jade.

There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.

Every breath you take is a step forward toward death. (Hazrat Ali-As)

nothing is forever and you better get the good stuff in before you run out of time.

have little to offer in this time when nothing lasts, only that desire to which you come as to a well. Even the language tells it: to satisfy and sadness rooted on one stock, the faithful breathing back towards shadow of everything that once bent to the sun. And still, the long slanting days pull us in, the warmth, the pitch of the hills, and everything in us wants to give over again— Only a little further, a hand's extending, a single word; the mirage, beautiful, beckons us on.

From the moment we are born, we begin to die.