Quotes About Impermanence

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered , with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme; it nyl no man abyde.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names.

Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again --- it never would have been the same. Start stealing!

Man is a transitory being, and his designs must partake of the imperfections their author.

Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?

We are all dead men on leave.

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

Afflictive emotions — our jealousy, anger, hatred, fear — can be put to an end. When you realize that these emotions are only temporary, that they always pass on like clouds in the sky, you also realize they can ultimately be abandoned.

There never was, there never will be, a man who is always praised, or a man who is always blamed.

The interval is immense between corporeal qualifications and sciences: the body in a moment is extinct, but knowledge endureth to the end of time.

What falls away is always. And is near.

It was that feeling of not being able to quite capture it, not being able to commit the moment, the feeling, to memory because it was too fleeting. She

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.

Sic transit gloria mundi [So passes away the glory of this world].

How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

All things that have been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give them.

Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes.

Leave nothing for death but a burned-out castle