Quotes About Transience

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever

I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly. Flowers are sweet. They have short, beatific lives. They offer much pleasure. There is nothing in this world that can be said against them. Sad, isn't, that all they can kiss is the air. Yes, yes! We are the lucky ones.

I think this is / the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind / a little dying

and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death?

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.

to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows.

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;      Nought may endure but mutability!

Kita terlelap, namun tidur kita teracuni mimpi. Kita terjaga, tapi angan mencemari. Kita merasa, berpikir, atau menimbang; menangis atau tertawa, mendekap derita atau menghalau nestapa; semua sama belaka; sebab suka maupun duka, dapat sewaktu-waktu pergi. Kemarin takkan seperti esok hari; tiada satu pun yang lestari!

But soon," he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, "I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall

All things that have form eventually decay. -Orochimaru

Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.

There is no permanent ideal of disease resistance, merely the shifting sands of impermanent obsolescence.

Naked we're born, naked we'll go, See how the vain are soon brought low. God speed the poor boy on his way, Fear not, we'll meet some other day.

There is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting.

Wheeling his bicycle by his side, the boy took the narrow path down the slope of the hill to the valley and the houses below. Roark looked after him. He had never seen that boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.

No. Forget it. You're only fooling yourself." "About what?" "About anything being worth a damn. It's dust, lady, all of it, dust and blood.

One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside—just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it. Years

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This

It's not only "my work"—forgive the pompous phrase—that I bequeath to my survivors but all the mental and sensual pleasures that come with being a living human: sitting in the spring sunshine, feeling the warmth of friends, solving a difficult equation. All that will go on without me. I am content, in the time that remains, to be a transient cell in the larger human super-being.

Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos.

But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense? Sure, I said. Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.

Sometimes a good day lasts all about 10 seconds.