Quotes About Transience

Nosotros, los perecederos, tocamos los metales, el viento, las orillas del oceano, las piedras, sabiendo que seguiran, inmoviles o ardientes, y yo fui descubriendo, nombrando todas las cosas: fue mi destino amar y despedirme.

Worldly objects are short-lived. They may or may not last until tomorrow. They consume the life of our senses. No matter how long we live, it is not enough. Therefore, O Gurudeva, please keep your chariots, elephants, and dancing girls for yourself. "A human being can never be satiated with wealth.

He who concentrates on one isolated wave of life will suffer, because that wave is unstable and will not last.

It's humbling to be reminded that no matter how big your life is, you are still a speck of dust that can be swept off this earth in half a second.

In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built; the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away; light slides endlessly into night; fire and love consume themselves; the heart tries to warm itself with ashes.

Nothing is perfect for long, though sometimes it's perfect for a little while. It can only be pried out of the moment, sequestered between the red leatherette covers where it begins its career as a memory. Bits of reality are pressed to the pages like wildflowers, flattened and faded, but there.

Even the pearl at her earlobe looked alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy.

The flowers you gave me—they died.

Not like the same face on the passing bus that seems to speak, that is seen once and at least is gone forever

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

then he's gone. She can hear him walking away up the passage. His footsteps sound hesitant, but he doesn't turn back. Nor will the moment return, which is true of all moments, though not equally.

Memento mori," the monarch whispered. "Remember death. Even for those who wield great power, life is brief. There is only one way to triumph over death, and that is by making our lives masterpieces.

Tempus fugit.

I am a cosmic accident, and soon I will be dead.

Life is a sea that brings waves of change, welcome or not. As the warrior-emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Time is a river of passing events. No sooner is one thing brought to sight than it's swept away, and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away." The Buddha, leaving behind both his protected childhood and ascetic renunciation, and having attained illumination, observed, "Everything that begins also ends. Make peace with this and all will be well.

I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.

A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.

even the Pyramids and other "great works" were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.

HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER

she returned, trailing clouds of glory which quickly dissipated in the mundane flow of sensory trivia.

Here we are at the bottom, almost empty. It's like confetti, these dried remnants you find in the street for a party no one invited you to. But they used to be, I can admit, part of something beautiful.

Alice knows everything about me, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.

Even when months and days are long, life is short.

I suppose that there are many novels that are set during the summer because it's a lonely time of year. Friends come and go, comfort comes and goes, which makes it a perfect time of year to indulge in melancholia.