Quotes About Transience

Time is flying never to return.

Optima dies...prima fugit (The best days are the first to flee)

Here, too, the honorable finds its due and there are tears for passing things; here, too, things mortal touch the mind.

All our sweetest hours fly fastest.

Fugit irreparabile tempus.

Each man has his day, and the time of life is brief for all, and never comes again.

Optima dies...prima fugit

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

I lie back. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving — on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up, through the trees, into the sky. The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever.

Death is woven in with the violets," said Louis. "Death and again death.")

But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.

Sometimes, one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lusts.

With my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is forever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest.

All the same that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park...then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! -- that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

My heart currently resembles the ashes of my cigarettes.

these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.