Quotes About Transience

Happiness "disappears in a moment," he says, "like a dewdrop on a blade of grass."* Basing your comfort on things that don't last is a futile strategy for living.

Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn't last forever.

When my children were teenagers, I took them to meet the Sixteenth Karmapa. As they weren't Buddhists, I asked His Holiness to say something that didn't require any understanding of the dharma. Without hesitating, he told them: "You are going to die; and when you do, you will take nothing with you but your state of mind.

Basing your comfort on things that don't last is a futile strategy for living. Even when you get something you've always wanted, the pleasure you get lasts for such a short time.

Chögyam Trungpa put it, "Sanity is permanent, neurosis is temporary.

The second reminder is impermanence. Life is very brief. Even if we live to be a hundred, it's very brief.

Impermanence can teach you a lot about how to cheer up.

The written argument endures. The oral argument is fleeting.

Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible.

What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art

It is because everything must come to an end that everything is so beautiful.

Acting is a strange business; one day it's there, and the next day nowhere to be seen.

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be… And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

Know thy birth! For dost thou art, and shalt to dust return.

O delicious kiss, Why thou so sudden art gone? Lost in the moment thou art won?

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.

Death will come when thou art dead, soon, too soon.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain

Art is difficult transient is her reward.

maybe some people just aren't meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through...

Maybe some people just aren't meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through. It's like some people just come through our lives to bring us something: a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn.

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We're tiny. We don't matter. We're here for a second and then gone the next. We're a sneeze in the life of the universe.