Quotes About Transience

Hij begreep niet waarom hij zoo oud moest worden, terwijl de dingen zoo langzaam voorbij gingen, stille voorbij, maar zóo slepend, als waren ze, de dingen van vroeger, spoken, die slierden heel lange sluiers langs heel lange paden, en als ritselden de sluiers over de warrelende bladeren, die neêrdwarrelden over het pad.

Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.

Corner Seat Suspended in a moving night The face in the reflection train Looks at first sight as self-assured As your own face - But look again: Windows between you and the world Keep out the cold, keep out the fright; Then why does your reflection seem So lonely in the moving night?

Like all happiness, it did not last long.

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

He sat quietly for a moment, lost in what was now and forever the past. The scene he described would never be repeated. That overheard sound would never be heard again.

Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.

The petals numbered but degrade to prose Summer's triumphant poem of the rose.

A lo que me refiero es que ahora estoy aquí por un tiempo indefinido, pero ¿luego qué, adónde iré? (Del cuento Panteón de Dolores)

From 'Periodic Table of Elements': A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a phial of ether | Thrown on fire--just | A little jump of flame, like grief, or | Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing | Off, it then is gone.

I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost.

No evil can persist, and as to things, Why, nothing is unchangeable.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

What once sprung from the earth sinks back into the earth.

Wherefore, fond wretch, dost thou grieve thus, for what is now a hideous mass of mortality — mere bones, and nerves, and veins? Nations have fallen unlamented; even worlds themselves, long ere this globe of ours was created, have mouldered into nothing; nor hath any one wept over them; why then should'st thou indulge this vain affliction for a child of the dust — a being as frail as thyself, and like thee the creature but of a moment?

When you die, you don't get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don't get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can't lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can't suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.

love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow – beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow – beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.

What lasts? What lasts? What lasts? What lasts? What lasts? And so he stares for an hour or so at all her notes, at the poorly sketched drawings for an art movement that has now come to an end, and realizes how there are all these moments, moments just like this one, there are all these moments, and how everyone lives their lives in these short, all-too-short moments. There are all these moments and what's so interesting, what makes them beautiful, is the fact that none of them last.

I too could go, oh, yes, at a moment's notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying

This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.

No w?a?nie, przedmioty potrafi? przetrwa?, a ?ywi tymczasem znikaj?.