Quotes About Transience

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'.

Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.

Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: I, death, am here, in the midst of life.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.

And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.

Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life. It was almost as if a secret had passed between them. Was this some kind of love? I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness. I wanted to whisper to them: 'This is it. This is it'.

In a world of shifting past, these memories are wheat in wind, fleet in dreams, shapes in clouds. Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away.

caressing each moment as an emerald on temporary consignment.

Everything worthwhile in your life draws its meaning from the fact you will die.

The meaning of life,' wrote Kafka, reputedly, 'is that it stops.

Enjoy life, because quick as the wind blows in, it disappears the same way, what I'm hinting at, just like our lives on earth, we appear; and we also depart.

Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.

The wise want nothing but accept whatever comes their way, letting it pass when it is time to part ways. Ram is

Arjuna, that which is born will die and that which will die will be born. So it is pointless to cling and mourn. —Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2, Verse 27 (paraphrased).

What is the most amazing thing about the world? 'Every day creatures die, yet the rest live as if immortal.

so if you feel a little breeze or smell a donut smell sometimes, why, you know it's just my thoughts passing through.

Nothing is ever the same. Nothing is permanent. Nothing can be trusted to be there. Nothing is safe, including home. Why lie to yourself? Every day we leave something, someone, some observation behind.

when the great moments came, you should stop and enjoy them, because they weren't going to last.

Al igual que las nubes que se forman en el cielo permanecen cierto tiempo en él y luego se disuelven en el vacío del espacio, los pensamientos ilusorios surgen, duran un momento y después se desvanecen en la vacuidad de la mente. De hecho no ha pasado realmente nada.

What a waste of time it is to take so much care of this body, feeding it the most succulent dishes, dressing it in the most fashionable clothes, and trying to make it look younger than it really is. The body has no other destination than the cemetery where it will be burned, buried, or fed to the birds.