Quotes About Transience

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.

Whatever is beautiful owes its beauty to itself, and when it dies its beauty dies with it. Praise adds nothing to beauty, makes it neither better nor worse.

Soon you will have forgotten all things: soon all things will have forgotten you.

as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. Consider what the spirit is: air, and never the same air

All is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

Cuántos de los agasajados con muchos himnos están ya entregados al olvido! ¡Cuántos de los que hicieron esos himnos hace tiempo que están ausentes!

17. Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you're alive and able—be good.

Let a glance at thyself bring to mind one of the Caesars. Then let the thought strike thee: where are they now? Nowhere, or none can say where. For thus shalt thou habitually look upon human things as mere smoke and as naught; and more than ever so, if thou bethink thee that what has once changed will exist no more throughout eternity. Why strive then and strain?

iii. that if you were suddenly lifted up and could see life and its variety from a vast height, and at the same time all the things around you, in the sky and beyond it, you'd see how pointless it is. And no matter how often you saw it, it would be the same: the same life forms, the same life span. Arrogance … about this?

Before long, either ashes or a skeleton, and either just a name or not even that

hay que ver siempre lo humano como flor de un día e inconsistente, ayer era una mucosidad, mañana será momia y cenizas. Ese

That men of a certain type should behave as they do is inevitable. To wish it otherwise were to wish the fig-tree would not yield its juice. In any case, remember that in a very little while both you and he will be dead, and your very names will quickly be forgotten.

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are—all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To

To put it shortly: 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 in a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.

tanto el que goza de un tiempo más largo como el que ha de morir rápidamente deja atrás lo mismo, porque sólo es el presente de lo que va a verse privado, si es eso lo único que tiene y si uno no deja atrás lo que no tiene.

when thou art much vexed or grieved, that man's life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the "what" is in constant flux, the "why" has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

In a little while you too will close your eyes, and soon there will be others mourning the man who buries you.

Discard everything except these few truths: we can live only in the present moment, in this brief now; all the rest of our life is dead and buried or shrouded in uncertainty. Short is the life we lead, and small our patch of earth.

Each of us lives only now, in this brief instant. The rest of our life has been lived already, or is impossible to see because it lies in the unknowable future.

Like an attachment to a sparrow: we glimpse it and it's gone.

Everything lasts for a day, the one who remembers and the remembered.

Both he that praiseth, and he that is praised; he that remembers, and he that is remembered, will soon be dust and ashes.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the "what" is in constant flux, the "why" has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here