Quotes About Transience

When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone.

I've lived out of a suitcase for four years.

This idea of how everything is interconnected, and the impermanence of things.. It sums up the human condition to me, and it helps me on my path.

To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.

We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Please don't, above all, plant me in your heart. I grow too quick.

It is nothing but a breath, the void.

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

No feeling is final.

Oh quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand.

I am thinking of a summer on the Baltic when I was a child: how talkative I was to sea and forest; how, filled with unaccustomed exuberance, I tried to leap over all limits with the hasty excitement of my words. And how, as I had to take my leave on a morning in September, I saw that we never give utterance to what is final and most blessed, and that all my rhapsodic Table d'hote conversations did not approach either my inchoate feelings or the ocean's eternal self-revelation.

No, my life is not this precipitous hour through which you see me passing at a run.

IMPERMANENCE Driftsand of the hours. Quietly disappearing, continuously, even the happily consecrated design. Life blows away, always: pillars already rise without connection, carrying nothing but empty air.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore/Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time/will stay up, read, write long letters/and wander the avenues, up and down/restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Wie hab ich das gefühlt was Abschied heißt. Wie weiß ichs noch: ein dunkles unverwundnes grausames etwas, das ein Schönverbundnes noch einmal zeigt und hinhält und zerreißt.

Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being . . . . It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisibly, inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

The trees which you planted as a child Have long since grown too heavy; you do not deceive them. But the winds ... but the spaces ... Raise no monument. For it is the roses Which salute Him year by year with their petals. This, you see, is Orpheus

But this press of time—take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

Une rose seule, c'est toutes les roses et celle-ci: l'irremplaçable, le parfait, le souple vocable encadré par le texte des choses. Comment jamais dire sans elle ce que furent nos espérances, et les tendres intermittences, dans la partance continuelle.