Quotes About Transience

Art is long, life is short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient.

Stop and consider! life is but a day

We're all expendable. We think the world's going to stop when a pope dies, or a king. And then... life goes on.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

Death, like an overflowing stream, Sweeps us away: our life's a dream.

When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.

All human life can be found in an airport.

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.

All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay.

In life, and in sports, we all know that nothing lasts forever.

It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life.

But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd Than that which withering on the virgin thorn Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

Now seen...now gone, The butterfly flits in and out Through fence-hung flowers; But a life lived so close to them I envy...though it's here and gone.

These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.

Catch, then, oh! catch the transient hour, Improve each moment as it flies; Life's a short summer-man a flower; He dies-alas! how soon he dies!

Life is short and art is long.

Our life is but a grain of sand in the indifferent ocean of infinity.