Quotes About Transience

Every life is terminal. No matter how long we get to live, we are all headed for the same end.

And then we stupidly fear one kind of death, while we have already passed and are passing so many others.

Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being.

How can you treat death so lightly? she asks. Because it happens, he replies. It is inevitable. I do not mourn the falling of a leaf or the breaking of a wave. I do not sorrow for a shooting star as it burns itself up in the atmosphere. Why should I?

I? I am nothing, replied the other. A leaf caught in a whirlpool, perhaps. A feather in the wind...

In a moment, she would be gone, taking with her my chance of obtaining some answers on which my life might depend.

The waves move outward from Amber and this, too, may pass away-and me along with it.

He spent long hours meditating on the wisdom of loving living things which invariably ended up dead.

Here and there, on the trees, some leaves remain. And I often stand deep in thought before them. I contemplate a leaf and attach my hope to it. When the wind plays with the leaf, I tremble in every limb. And if it should fall, alas, my hope falls with it. - Schubert

For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. —JAMES 4:14

nuestro universo desaparecerá tan abruptamente como, probablemente, empezó.

He dropped by the office, to pay for another night's stay. He always rented rooms one night at a time, even when he knew he was going to hang out in a place longer. It was a reassuring habit. A comforting ritual, intended to confirm his absolute freedom to move on.

OK, Finlay, let's get it done," I said. "I don't have an address because I don't live anywhere. Maybe one day I'll live somewhere and then I'll have an address and I'll send you a picture postcard and you can put it in your damn address book, since you seem so damn concerned about it.

Some old guy once said the meaning of life is that it ends. Which was inescapably true. No one lives forever.

You can be gone tomorrow.

13. Mañana habrá desaparecido (Gone Tomorrow)

And are we not all "mere guests" upon this whirling earth?

An image comes to Russell: we drift through the world like dandelion puffs on the wind, we spread our seed and disappear, and the world doesn't care. The world doesn't even notice. The world is not about us. Finally

A person never knows what is next—I don't, anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

A person never knows what is next -- I don't, anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all. Virgil Wander

Nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable.

What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while-- and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet-- but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about.

for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, 'in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.