Quotes About Transience

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

there are so many dayswhen living stops and pulls up and sitsand waits like a train on the rails.

The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.

Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?

Every instant of time... is a pinprick of eternity.

The beauty of today may not be realised until it becomes tomorrow's memory

Celebrate every moment of your life. In one memorable day, you will be gone.

All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.

If man were never to fade away ... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.

Nothing is forever, if you have enough power tools.

Wij zijn als regendruppels die, tegen het raam van een voortrazende trein geblazen, met kleine rukjes verder kruipen; niemand kan precies voorspellen welke weg ze zullen volgen, al komen ze op den duur wel allemaal aan de rand van het glas terecht, om te vervloeien en te verdwijnen.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.

we should love all of our dear ones …, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.

Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that "all things everywhere are perishable.

Some people, I realize, will find it depressing or even morbid to contemplate impermanence. I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts.

I must die. If forthwith, I die; and if a little later, I will take lunch now,

Like Buddhists, Stoics advise us to contemplate the world's impermanence. "All things human," Seneca reminds us, "are short-lived and perishable."19

the "flux and change" of the world around us are not an accident but an essential part of our universe.20

everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us. If nothing else, our own death will deprive us of them. More generally, we should keep in mind that any human activity that cannot be carried on indefinitely must have a final occurrence.

It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives.

From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.