Quotes About Transience

The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.

Nothing can save us. All this sweetness dies and rots.

Brain is a temporary phenomenon in Nature. Performance is eternal.

Primejdie! Ne b?l?cim cu toÈ›ii în bezna morÈ›ii, în ea dispare mereu câte un cap...

Corpses are more fit to be thrown out than is dung.

Realize that war is common and justice is strife, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.

If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would distinguish them.

You can't go home again. Your childhood is lost. The friends of your youth are gone. Your present is slipping away from you. Nothing is ever the same.

Ik heb het tijdelijke met het eeuwige vaak genoeg verwisseld in mijn poëzie om te weten dat ik het tijdelijke wil.

De grands pans du monde ressemblaient à une mélodie que l'on croit ne pouvoir oublier, hors de laquelle cependant l'on glisse, désormais contraint de la rechercher sans relâche et douloureusement .

One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.

The objective world is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling along the lifeline of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

When the rich give a party and the meal is finished, a man carries round amongst the guests a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, carved and painted to look as much like the real thing as possible, and anything from 18 inches to 3 foot long; he shows it to each guest in turn, and says: "Look upon this body as you drink and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead." [Herodotus 'Histories', II 82]

A gente sai para dar uma caminhada e o mundo se abre. E antes que a gente tenha conseguido esticar bem as pernas, mais uma vez ele se fecha. Daqui até ali é só um liga-e-desliga de uma lanterna, e chamam isso de vida. Nem vale a pena calçar os sapatos.

Transient guests are we.

We humans make all that present which is never there, and which is always hurrying past us like the tumble of a stream, an all-important thing.

We are all dying, just at different speeds.

Petrarch writes, "between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed toward death. We are always dying—I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.

Why does the future feel so much like the past, the uncanny clammy touch of it, the rustle of bridal sheet or shroud, the crackle of fire in a shuttered room? Like breath misting glass, like the nightingale's trace on the air, like a wreath of incense, like vapour, like water, like scampering feet and laughter in the dark.

If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone.

We are always dying – I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.

I wanted this world to still. I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind...

That's what mortal means," I say with a sigh that I don't have to fake. "We die. Think of us like shooting stars, brief but bright.