Quotes About Transience

It's very limiting to us as a species, the concept of better-than/less-than. It just seems to be at its end. I'm like, this all fades to black, and it's gone. It's dust. Choose carefully what you obsess about.

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, 'Well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species.'

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

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.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

When it is time to part, then it is time to part. There should be no regrets. The beauty of marriage is like the fleeting perfection of a snowflake.

Having glimpsed a small part of life, men rise up and disappear as smoke, knowing only what each one has learned.

What an illusion Mahamaya has conjured up! Here is this infinite world, and what one claims as his possession will be left behind at death. Still men cannot understand this simple truth.

This life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.

Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.

I've owned more sofas than I've had husbands. Both sag in the end, but I generally fall out of love with the furniture quicker than the men.

Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.

But all this world is like a tale we hear - Men's evil, and their glory, disappear.

Our lives pass from us like the wind, and why Should wise men grieve to know that they must die? The Judas blossom fades, the lovely face Of light is dimmed, and darkness takes its place.

The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains.

If the criminal will not keep his gains for ever and his victim will not always suffer want, surely man passes like a shadow and troubles himself in vain.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.

But the best I've known Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown About the winds of the world, and fades from brains Of living men, and dies.

the difference between poets and mystics . . . The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.

The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.

Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the real thing. The effect wears off too soon.

But the only feature of the view that ever changed was the signatures of foam deposited on the beach by the waves. Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own runup onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start, but each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of grey foam and got buried underneath the next.

We're only immortal for a limited time.