Quotes About Transience

Everything new and beautiful seems to arrive already haunted by its own demise.

He was already fading. I knew that it wouldn't be long until he was just a vague image, however much I tried to cling onto his memory.

This is my temporary home It's not where I belong Windows and rooms that I'm passing through This is just a stop, on the way to where I'm going I'm not afraid because I know this is my Temporary home

Why, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, do I so frequently choose death, transience, and the grave as subjects for my paintings? One must submit oneself many times to death in order some day to attain life everlasting.

Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

The humblest individual under heaven,   Than might suffice a moderate century through. I knew that nought was lasting, but now even   Change grows too changeable without being new.

All things must pass.

Call in thy death's head there: tie up thy fears.

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passion, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cock-crow.

The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

They say night's beauties fade at dawn, and the children of wine are oft disowned in the morning light.

Still, night falls for all of us in the end, and too soon for some.

There's nothing half so mortal as a grey goose feather.

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem … but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

He went to the window seat, picked up a harp, and ran his fingers lightly over its silvery strings. Sweet sadness filled the room as man and wife and babe faded like the morning mist, only the music lingering behind to speed her on her way.

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

I don't mind traveling that much when I can go somewhere and stay there for a while, but touring is different. You rarely see anything. You get there early in the morning and you're resting all day, and you go in and do a sound check, and you do the show, and then bam you're gone.

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.

It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words .

Come quickly. You mustn't miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again.

These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.

Macaulay is well for awhile, but one wouldn't live under Niagara.