Quotes About Transience

Maiden, that read'st this simple rhyme, Enjoy thy youth, it will not stay; Enjoy the fragrance of thy prime, For oh, it is not always May!

What matters most has an ultimate metallic quality of death. The chasuble and the wagon wheel, the razor and the prickly beards of shepherds, the bare moon, a fly, humid cupboards, rubble piles, the images of saints covered in lace, quicklime, and the wounding edges of the rooflines and watchtowers.

Where all have gone, and all must go To be the nothing that I was 'Ere born to life and living woe!

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers

Swift speedy time, feathered with flying hours, Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.

It is conceivable that in principle man's motor through-ways resemble the slime trails along which are drawn the gathering mucors that erect the spore palaces, that man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning--that he must descend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.

Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn't mean you'll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn't mean you'll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week.

We think of life as a solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid.

shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one brief flash.

shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light.

The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye. The story of love is Hello and Goodbye. Until we meet again.......

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.

Just an ordinary day. "And then—gone.

on a bright fall day, I had what I believed at the time to be an apprehension of death. It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling (but from what? were there even trees on West Fifty-seventh Street?), a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright.

Get over yourself - You are not the center of the universe.' 'Understand that life itself (and emotions) are impermanent.

We leave no trace as we pass on. Ghostlike, we cast no shadow.

And it is partly the transience of it that delights me; so much loving preparation, so much art and experience, put into a pleasure that can last only a moment, and which only a few will ever fully appreciate.

A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.

I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands something bejeweled and treasured and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees.

People will come and people will go. But life sucks forever!

Not every person who came to your life and loved you was planning to stay, to some you were just a path to their love destination.

It is wasteful to invest your time with someone that may be gone soon.