Quotes About Transience

To-day man is, and to-morrow he will be seen no more. And being removed out of sight, quickly also he is out of mind. O the dulness and hardness of man's heart, which thinketh only of the present, and looketh not forward to the future. Thou oughtest in every deed and thought so to order thyself, as if thou wert to die this day.

In the morning consider that you may not live till evening, and when evening comes do not dare to promise yourself the dawn.

Vanidad es mirar solamente a esta presente vida y no prever lo venidero. Vanidad es amar lo que tan presto se pasa: y no buscar con solicitud el gozo perdurable

O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!

But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration.

If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment.

We live, we love, we die. A little while we sing in the sun, and then ... we are gone.

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,When June is past, the fading rose;For in your beauty's orient deepThese flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not....

One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.

Today So here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away. Out of Eternity This new Day is born; Into Eternity, At night, will return. Behold it aforetime No eye ever did: So soon it forever From all eyes is hid. Here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away.

All things that have been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give them.

All glories of flesh vanish, and this, the glory of infantine beauty seen in the mirror of memory, soonest of all.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window that is foggy with the breath of a life gone by.

Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes.

You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.

To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.

I thought: I didn't live forever.

It's always best to look ahead and not backwards. Possessions are not important. Think of those beautiful porcelain pieces I had. Before they came to me, they had all passed through the hands of many people, surviving wars and natural disasters. I got them only because someone else lost them. While I had them, I enjoyed them; now some other people will enjoy them. Life itself is transitory. Possessions are not important.

Epicurus summed up his whole philosophy in his epitaph: 'I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind' If

Life's true face is the skull.

Leave nothing for death but a burned-out castle

What we are and what we possess is but a loan- and that not for long! Do not clutch what has been given to you, for joy and desire to possess are but nails fastening you to the perishable world.