Quotes About Transience

Slechts één ding is blijvend, een nooit eindigende schoonheid, die van de ene vorm overgaat in de andere, vluchtig doorgebladerd, voortdurend wisselend, maar die je zeker niet voor altijd kunt vasthouden, in musea neerzetten en in noten vastleggen kunt, om dan jong en oud erbij te roepen, zodat ze erover kunnen zwetsen en druk doen.

Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one's worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.

The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

Life is like a flame that is always burning itself out...

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

It was one of those moments of implicit revelation which will sometimes happen even between people who meet quite transiently,–on a mile's journey, perhaps, or when resting by the wayside. There is always this possibility of a word or look from a stranger to keep alive the sense of human brotherhood.

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall tonight, For thou must die.

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

The logs of wood which move down the river together Are driven apart by every wave. Such inevitable parting Should not be the cause of misery.

A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.

I have three friendships that have lasted a long time, but everybody else has come and gone.

With every film, we form a small little world for a period of time. Everybody is close, and then one fine day everything is over. That can throw you off. So you have to learn to take things in your stride and not get too emotional about people or situations.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present 'nowness': a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist; a region can't be tied to a specific timescale.

When I was 14, I was on the cover of 'Bop' and 'Tiger Beat.' Every two months, I would see a new kid's face, and I remember saying, 'This is not something that lasts very long.'

There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.

It was not for moon gazing I came into Mount Yoshino yet seeing it I grieve over the sad world

Since nowhere can be home let me live nowhere in this scant hut in this brief world

Why does my heart still cling to the blossoms though I thought all attachments long gone?

Now seen...now gone, The butterfly flits in and out Through fence-hung flowers; But a life lived so close to them I envy...though it's here and gone.

Beyond this life and This world I'll have it til My heart's content: The bright moon that passed over The horizon before I had my fill.

Every day we are changing, every day we are dying, and yet we fancy ourselves eternal.

The world's thy ship and not thy home.