Quotes About Transience

I run to the water's edge and the cold ocean licks my toes. Without touching my face I can feel that it's wet with fog and tears and sweat. I stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.

I suppose a fire that burns that bright is not meant to last.

After the dead words, after the ones still said and spoken, what do you expect? Some flying leaves, more scattered papers. Who knows? Some dissolving words, like the light or the echo dying out there in the great night.

Was im großen Hotel erlebt wird, das sind keine runden, vollen, abgeschlossenen Schicksale. Es sind nur Bruchstücke, Fetzen, Teile; hinter den Türen wohnen Menschen, gleichgültige oder merkwürdige, Menschen im Aufstieg, Menschen im Niedergang; Glückseligkeiten und Katastrophen wohnen Wand an Wand. Die Drehtür dreht sich, und was zwischen Ankunft und Abreise erlebt wird, das ist nichts Ganzes" (S. 309)

Beauty is like a sunset: it goes as soon as you try to capture it. The beauty you like is precisely that which escapes you.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

Joy and sorrow, beauty and deformity, equally pass away.

Newness hath an evanescent beauty.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

Beauty is a frail good.

That's the hell of sand castles. They are always doomed. That's part of their beauty — their impermanence.

Do not be tempted by English roses. Their beauty fades, but their thorns are forever.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

Glamour is a shooting star, it catches your eye, but fades away, beauty is the sun always brilliant day after day.

The flowers anew, returning seasons bring; but beauty faded has no second spring.

Beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.

How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.

Pity! The southerly trees have shed their leaves. Nobody comes to appreciate the mountain's beauty. Tomorrow I too will float away. My reflection gone from cool streams.

... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.

We want to know what our self is. We are the sky. Our thoughts are the birds that come and go. You can enjoy the birds and their beauty, but it is the sky that lasts.

Beauty's witching sway is now to me a star that's fallen-a dream that's passed away.