Quotes About Transience

Love in a night shall live and die, Love in a day shall wing and fly; Love in the Spring shall last an hour, Easily fade a spring-tide flower.

Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains. Liber AL vel Legis, II: 9

Ogni tanto, nelle giornate di vento, scendeva fino al lago e passava ore a guardarlo, giacché, disegnato sull'acqua, gli pareva di vedere l'inspiegabile spettacolo, lieve, che era stata la sua vita.

Le risoluzioni definitive si prendono sempre e soltanto per uno stato d'animo che non è destinato a durare. — Chi l'ha detto? — Marcel Proust. Non sbagliava mai, quello.

Es ist ein sonderbarer Schmerz. ... Nach etwas zu vergehen, das man nie erleben wird.

parce qu'il lui semblait voir, dessiné sur l'eau, le spectacle léger, et inexplicable qu'avait été as vie.

Nous sommes un cimetière à la dérive.

Guardava quella casa, davanti a sé, e pensava alla misteriosa permanenza delle cose nella corrente mai ferma della vita. Stava pensando che ogni volta, vivendo con loro, si finisce per lasciare su di loro come una mano leggera di vernice, la tinta di certe emozioni destinate a scolorare, sotto il sole, in ricordi.

Melancholy is to know the beauty of life, and to know it must end.

Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust.

To be cut down to size is good for all of us, but particularly so for those who forget how transient are our cultures and institutions, how pointless and cruel our divisions, how vain our claims to special status for our practices and beliefs above those of others.

That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience.

and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.

Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours for ever, but we are little more than squatters.

all the good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant.

The sight of such beauty can make us quiet with fear; fear that it might not be real, fear that it might be taken from us, as is everything that we love, which is only on loan to us.

Sub specie aeternitatis, she thought: In the context of eternity, this is nothing, as are all our human affairs.

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer

Life is a progression of partings," said the psychotherapist. "One by one, people—and things too—are taken from us. We lose them, they die, they are shown by us to be things of transitory association." "I'm sorry," said Ulf. "So am I," said Dr. Svensson.

The world was a lonely place, a place of transience, of change, of loss; only the bonds, the ties of friendship and family protect us from the loneliness

We change the earth and our changes may only be temporary; yet the signs of what we have done may persist, as these mounds did.

E sempre o mesmo coro ressoa: Como o tempo passa e a vida voa!

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

He was as fragile as wood smoke, barely a memory against the landscape.