Quotes About Transience

Once again, without explaining anything, they understood that they must leave. Go away before this world woke up and continued with a life from which they were forever excluded.

o a gente de paso.

Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour?

And then, inevitably, one day—it's gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.

And then, inevitably, one day it's gone. And we realise we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable in the world. That the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure. Like the playing pieces of a game and cannot move of their own accord. That they are held in place by our need for them. By our love. How stupid.

It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original.

Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?

It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass.

Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.

It is this acute awareness of transience and limitation that constitutes mild depression.

I'm really afraid to feel happy because it never lasts

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

We are all seeking fulfillment while living at the mercy of changing experience. Whatever we acquire in life gets dispersed. Our bodies age. Our relationships fall away. Even the most intense pleasures last only a few moments.

But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside.

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness.

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

Our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding is but a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere.

If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still.

And life is thorny; and youth is vain

important goal today may turn to ashes tomorrow simply because we turn our attention to something else. We

Las historias tristes ocurren a veces en lugares tristes, como las estaciones de tren o los aeropuertos. Entonces la gente lo nota y lo comenta, y todos dicen que en verdad los aeropuertos y las estaciones de tren son sitios tristísimos, tan tristes que no dan ganas de volver a viajar pues a nadie le gusta meterse de lleno en la tristeza, y encima por esos precios.

It seems there's nothing so good or pure it cant be taken without a moment's notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway.