Quotes About Transience

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. -Sonnet 73

What, then, remains but that we still should cry, For being born, and, being born, to die?

Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.

And he'd thought he was going to gorge himself. It was bursting time again. You great big infant. That you could still believe that it could go on forever. Maybe now you've got a better picture of what's up. Well, let it come. I know what's up. Let it come. Eat breakfast and go. This is amazing moment. It's over

Another husband, another new house, another new country, but I never belong anywhere and I never own anything in my own right.

The Japanese believe that sadness comes from an awareness of the fragility of life at the same time one is captivated by its transient beauty. The cherry blossoms. But that is a very superficial understanding of sadness, may I say. True sadness arises when we realize that the world around us is imperishable, and rather ugly.

Men's pleasure swells in a brief space of time,   and likewise falls to the ground, shaken by an adverse judgement.

No human thing is of serious importance.

Llamo hombre vicioso al amante popular que ama el cuerpo más bien que el alma; porque su amor no puede tener duración, puesto que ama una cosa que no dura.

I'm an apple, tossed here by someone who loves you, Xanthippe. But you should nod assent: after all, you and I will both waste away.

Unfortunately, mortal life is very fragile, and very short. Yours could be shorter than usual.

we're just paper on a shelf, in the end

What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?

I suspected that what happens in hotel rooms rarely lasts outside of them. I suspected that when something was a beginning and an ending at the same time, that meant it could only exist in the present.

Maybe this is how it goes, I think, watching Beth and Melanie, remembering the people I have loved, and the ones I wish I hadn't lost. Maybe we are all Beths, boarding other people's life journeys, or letting them hop aboard ours. For a while we ride together. A few minutes, a few miles. Companions on the road, sharing our air and our view, our feet swaying to the same beat. Then you get off at your stop, or I get off at mine. Unless we decide to stay on longer together.

She was plagued again by the feeling that the room in which she stood, the earth on which it was built, and the universe in which it turned were as insubstantial as smoke, subject to sudden change.

When he looked away from her, the bottles were gone and with them all the vertical and horizontal currents of water and brandy that represented the omnidirectional tides of time's ocean.

The way Winny saw it, the best thing and the worst thing were the same thing: nothing lasted ... what to say and felt you didn't belong anywhere, books were a way to lead another life, a way to be someone else entirely, to be anyone at all.

I didn't tell her that death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.

If you think about it, you were born into a world populated by the dead, because every one of them will die one day.

Just like happy, sad didn't last. There was mostly the place between, so the tears stopped before the weather did.

I'd found love -- only to discover how fleeting it can be.

Nobody really owns anything. We give back our bodies at the end of our lives.We own our thoughts, but everything else is borrowed. Everything.