Quotes About Transience

Life is fleeting. It is to be enjoyed.

Life is so impermanent that it's not about somebody else or things around me, it's about knowing you are completely alone in this world and being content inside.

Life's true face is the skull.

Just as you commit to this life when it commits to leaving you.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

Life is short, yet sweet.

For one thing we may be grateful: this life is not eternal.

Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.

Helen says it alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas--just imagine it!--rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them

Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an afterlife in the city of ghosts, while from others, and thus was the death of Wickham Place, the spirit slips before the body perishes.

It is good to be loved, even though it will not last.

It's good to be loved, even thought it will not last

Ah! The transitory joy of the past week had been but the lightning's arrowy course scathing where it illumined!

The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it forever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide.

Remember that we must all die: all these personal relations we try to live by are temporary. I used to feel death selected people, it is a notion one gets from novels, because some of the characters are usually left talking at the end. Now 'death spares no one' begins to be real.

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness.

The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. #HowardsEnd

pereunt et imputantur mors ianua vitae

The happiest day—the happiest hourMy sear'd and blighted heart hath known,The highest hope of pride and power,I feel hath flown.

The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; And what is love but a rose that fades?

Today as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle.

You are here for but an instant, and you mustn't take yourself too seriously