Quotes About Transience

Worldly friends are deceptive time-wasters, Life like a flash of lightning in the sky, And material things like bubbles on a stream; Do not cling to them, Jampal Drak.

Lass dich fesseln, flüchtiger Gedanke!

We didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply, and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it.

Männer, die die Stadt für immer verlassen hatten, erinnerten sich manchmal an einem grauen, naßkalten Abend in London des rosigen Schimmers und der glühenden Pracht, die, kaum gesehen, auch schon wieder verblichen; sie fragten sich dann, warum sie die Küste so gehaßt hatten, und solange sie einen Tropfen im Glase hatten, sehnten sie sich danach, dorthin zurückzukehren.

The first colours touched the garden, deep green and then deep red – transience was my pigmentation; my roots would never go deep enough anywhere to make me a home or make me secure with love.

How bright we all bur. No wonder we were not made to last.

I knew that my life, there and then, was no more than a handful of sand squeezed into my clenched fist.

I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, and now that, and changes name as it changes direction.

This business is crazy-pants. We flit in and out of these fantasy worlds and these intense periods of work and camaraderie, and then it goes away, and you do it all over again.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

Something that is very special today might not be special tomorrow, but to hold it, to grasp it, to keep it, to make it special, to elevate it from the ordinary, that's when you open up the champagne. To make it sparkle.

I honestly feel it could all end tomorrow. Not just the band thing - I mean life.

Fashion's important to me, but beauty fades. All that stuff is fun while it lasts, but anything can happen tomorrow. You've got to have so much more about you than the way you look or your clothes.

Honeymoons are great, but they don't last. And I think the same is true with success on the screen - today, I am all over the place; tomorrow, I may be gone - I may have to make room for someone else. So why make a big song and dance about it all?

Being at the top of your game intellectually, philosophically, politically, is not a forever thing.

Life is short, and certainty never happens.

He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

Thousands die everywhere always. The world don't care much, it just don't mind much. That's what I notice about it. There is that great wailing and distress and then the pacifying waters close over everything, old Father Time washes his hands. On he plods to the next place.

Some friendships though, even strong and interesting ones, seem to have quite a short term, and cannot be prolonged.

Waren sie nicht alle Reisende, die wussten, dass die eigene Existenz im Angesicht des Universums so flüchtig war wie ein Boxenstopp an der Autobahn?