Quotes About Transience

Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.

Sometimes we found photographs of beautiful young girls, or handsome young men. There were pictures of old men, who looked like apostles, and old ladies with faded smiles. In some, one could see children playing in a park, babies crying, or newlyweds kissing. On the reverse of these were some farewells, oaths, or religious passages scribbled in handwriting obviously shaken by fear or the motion of the train. The words were often washed off by the morning dew or bleached out by the sun.

Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

No, no, we are definitely writ on water. Or cognac -- if we've any luck at all.

everything is temporary if you give it enough time...

The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn't care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can't be defined.

the bathroom to weigh myself or to the kitchen to drink a glass of tepid water before preparing the coffeepot. The city doesn't beckon or lend me a shoulder today. Maybe it knows I'm about to leave. The sun's dull disk defeats me; the dense sky is the same one that will carry me away. That vast and vaporous territory, lacking precise pathways, is all that binds us together now. But it never preserves our tracks.

The continuous work of our life is to build death.

There are a lot of people in each spot that you don't really know. I work with them that day, and move on and find new people. So purging and cleansing your friend list every day.

I'm used to being the background. I'm used to having work that only lasts for a little while. I'm used to being - working in the real world, where real things are.

The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.

When the last moment arrives, praise and blame will be the same to you, to me, and to others. We are here to work, and will have to leave all when the call comes.

No effect of work can be eternal.

There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral.

The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There's no such thing as permanence at all.

Every thought that is born has to die. It is what they call the death wish. If a thought does not die, it cannot be reborn. It has to die, and with it you die. But you don't die with each thought and breath. You hook up each thought with the next, creating a false continuity. It is that continuity that is the problem.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some people move our souls to dance. They awaken us to a new understanding with the passing whisper of their wisdom. Some people make the sky more beautiful to gaze upon. They stay in our lives for awhile.

True friendship is like a rose. We can't realize it's beauty until it fades.

A fickle thing is youth's

Everything that just recently had seemed eternal and solid as rock was so quickly turned into rack and ruin you just wanted to shut your eyes and forget.

Take everything that's yours with you, don't save any -- it won't be needed later.

Ma la felicità è come il cero sull'altare: si consuma prima che il voto si avveri.