Quotes About Transience

As our trek across time will make clear, life is likely transient, and all understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute. And so, in the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

Impermanence underlies experience.

In this scenario, the universe as we know it would merely be the latest in a temporal series, some of which may have contained intelligent life and the culture they created, but are now long ago extinguished. In due course, all of our contributions and those of any other life-forms our universe supports would be similarly erased.

The greatest relevancy can become irrelevant in the space of a heartbeat.

Though death will cancel it, life in this world is a glorious thing.

And that is when I know....that is when I understand that it's better to feel the ache inside me like demons scratching at my heart than it is to feel numb the way a dead body feels when you touch it. It's better to wait for the beautiful things...to stare at them for as long as they last..to hold on as tight as you can before they disappear. And it might hurt so bad inside...but it's better to wait for the next beautiful thing than never look for any again.

I have that feeling, which I have had often in Chile, that while human beings can make efforts to control, tame and use this place, clearing forests, marking boundaries, their influence here is only transitory.

Truly, as the ancients taught us, there is nothing under the moon, however fine, that is not subject to corruption.

There is something disturbing about this corner of America, a sinister suggestion of transience. There is a quality, hostile to men in the very earth and air here.

Why does it seem I won't come back here? Why speak of it as of, already, a place I miss?

I'd remember the way everyone else does: later, when none of it matters, memory as good as a mirror for changing things, no good at all

Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.

If the Earth were as old as a person, a typical organism would be born, live and die in a sliver of a second. We are fleeting, transitional creatures, snowflakes fallen on the hearth fire.

From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. What

We are like butterflies, who flutter for a day and think it's forever.

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

Esto no es una tragedia. El cristal se rompe tan fácilmente... Por cuidadoso que uno sea. El tránsito hace trepitar los estantes y las cosas se caen

The future is a map drawn in the sand, and the tide can wash it away in a moment.

Time was as thin as hope.

an event that had the consistency of smoke and lacked anything of substance.

Life was uncertain. Death was forever.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.