Quotes About Transience

And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.

We are bound to expire. Even metal which is sturdiest, rusts. Even oxygen, the breath of life, soon transpires.

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

I depart from life as from an inn, and not as from my home. [Lat., Ex vita discedo, tanquam ex hospitio, non tanquam ex domo.]

Nor do I regret that I have lived, since I have so lived that I think I was not born in vain, and I quit life as if it were an inn, not a home.

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

The May of life blooms once and never again.

Remember that life is short and death is long.

all of us were here for a little while, and then we were somewhere else; we were not alive at all; we approached living, but we never achieved it. We are going to die. Everybody was going to die.

Il mondo non era che un mito, un aereo trasparente, su cui tutto era in transito; anche noi […], eravamo qui solo di passaggio per finire poi chissà dove. Non eravamo vivi, noi, ci limitavamo a sfiorare la vita senza mai afferrarla.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing.

and here's a secret for you - everything beautiful is sad...gilded with impermanence...

My happiness is like this sand: I let it run out of my hand.

Some days load themselves with questions whose answers have died, and maybe never mattered hugely

our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

We are all dying of life.

Life is but a day: A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way From a tree's summit

There is nothing stable in the world uproar's your only music.

Life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.

TO A WITHERED ROSE Thy span of life was all too short— A week or two at best— From budding-time, through blossoming, To withering and rest. Yet compensation hast thou—aye!— For all thy little woes; For was it not thy happy lot To live and die a rose?

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

etherness n. the wistful feeling of looking around at a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now, it won't always be this way-that the coming years will steadily break people away into their own families, or see them pass away one by one, until there comes a time you look back and try to imagine what it feels like to have everyone together in the same place.

tiris the bittersweet awareness that all things must end.

Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.