Quotes About Transience

There is no perfect security only maximum temporary security

A brief life burns brightly.

For everything exists and not one sigh nor smile nor tear, one hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away.

The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives--transitoriness and oblivion.

Um aspecto muito visível do desaparecimento das velhas garantias é a nova fragilidade dos laços humanos. A fragilidade e transitoriedade dos laços pode ser um preço inevitável do direito de os indivíduos perseguirem seus objetivos individuais, mas não pode deixar de ser, simultaneamente, um obstáculo dos mais formidáveis para perseguir eficazmente esses objetivos -- e para a coragem necessária para persegui-los.

En la historia del mundo, nunca antes los no-lugares han ocupado tanto espacio". Los

La interrupción, la incoherencia, la sorpresa son las condiciones habituales de nuestra vida. Se han convertido incluso en necesidades reales para muchas personas, cuyas mentes sólo se alimentan […] de cambios súbitos y de estímulos permanentemente renovados […] Ya no toleramos nada que dure. Ya no sabemos cómo hacer para lograr que el aburrimiento dé fruto.

Cuando la relación está inspirada por las ganas ("las miradas se encuentran a través de una habitación atestada"), sigue la pauta del consumo y sólo requiere la destreza de un consumidor promedio, moderadamente experimentado. Al igual que otros productos, la relación es para consumo inmediato (no requiere una preparación adicional ni prolongada) y para uso único, "sin perjuicios". Primordial y fundamentalmente, es descartable.

Nevertheless, 'stick lightly' they must, as 'possessions, situations and people' will keep slipping away and vanishing at a breathtaking speed whatever they do; whether they try to slow them down or not is neither here nor there. 'Let them go' they must (though, unlike Bill Gates, with hardly any pleasure), but whether they do it graciously or with a lot of wailing and teethgnashing is beside the point.

vivimos en una época de re-ciclaje en la que nada parece morir del todo, de la misma forma que nada, ni siquiera la vida eterna, parece destinado a durar para siempre.

Where we hope to land (and where we do land, though only for a fleeting moment, enough for tired wings to catch the wind anew) is a 'there' which we thought of little and knew of even less.

Il tempo è ciò in grazia del quale ogni cosa, in ogni momento, diventa nulla nelle nostre mani.

have not got to where I vow to remember this. But we don't get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, "This! I will remember this moment always!" and all that remains is the memory of a desire to hold on to a memory. My uncle told me that every fall the dragonflies in Brazil return to the lake where they were born to touch down once more before dying. I have taken it on myself to remember this for him.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, And this too, shall pass away. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

And this, too, shall pass away.

And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

With mindfulness you can see the real owner of things. Do you think this is your world, your body? It is the world's world, the body's body. If you tell it, Don't get old, does the body listen? Does your stomach ask permission to get sick? We only rent this house; why not find out who really owns it?

A snow-capped mountain in Switzerland, seen from the comfort of an cabin, can set off a profound chain of thought about ice and ancient history; a gentle snow in the Paris suburbs can create images that show the transience of beauty. The winter window has two sides, one for the watcher and one for the white drifts, and the experience of winter is often not one or the other but both at once.

For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

Everything's finished. Riders gallop black horses, a tyrant composes a sentence of death with grammatical errors. Youth dissolves in a day; girls' faces freeze into medallions, despair turns to rapture and the hard fruits of stars in the sky ripen like grapes, and beauty endures, shaken, unperturbed, and God is and God dies; night returns to us in the evening, and the dawn is hoary with dew.

Are you aware of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the bitter sweetness of things?" "I'm afraid not." "The Japanese sages say the best way to appreciate beauty is to focus on its transient, fragile and fleeting nature.

The man who buries his house in the sand and digs it up again, each evening, learns to put it together quickly and just as quickly to take it apart. My parents sleep like children in the dark. I am too far to hear them breathe

But when I know that the glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.