Transience Quotes

Life is but a day,A fragile dew-drop on its perilous wayFrom a tree’s summit.

~ John Keats

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

~ Eckhart Tolle

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

~ Virginia Woolf

We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon

~ Frederic Manning

Momentary happiness is worse than permanent misery.

~ Ahmed Mostafa

As I age in the world it will rise and spread,and be for this place horizonand orison, the voice of its winds.I have made myself a dream to dreamof its rising, that has gentled my nights.Let me desire and wish well the lifethese trees may live when Ino longer rise in the morningsto be pleased with the green of themshining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them.

~ Wendell Berry

Flowers, cold from the dew,And autumn's approaching breath,I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,Which haven't faded yet.In their nights, fragrantly resinous,Entwined with delightful mystery,They will breathe in her springlikeExtraordinary beauty.But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,From her shing head they will flutterAnd fall—and before herThey will die, faintly fragrant still.And, impelled by faithful longing,My obedient gaze will feast upon them—With a reverent hand,Love will gather their rotting remains.

~ Anna Akhmatova

Ah, Lalage! while life is ours, Hoard not thy beauty rose and white, But pluck the pretty fleeing flowers That deck our little path of light: For all too soon we twain shall tread The bitter pastures of the dead: Estranged, sad spectres of the night.

~ Ernest Dowson

As wave is driven by wave And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead, So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows, Always, for ever and new. What was before Is left behind; what never was is now; And every passing moment is renewed.

~ Ovid

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for awhile, then closesWithin a dream.

~ Ernest Dowson

But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last.

~ Prince

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.(Ephemera)

~ George Sterling

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

~ Michael Connelly

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.

~ Colson Whitehead

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The beauty of this day doesn't depend on its lasting forever.

~ Marty Rubin

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring - these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are worthier of our admiration.

~ Yoshida Kenkō

The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,This is no common waste, no common gloom;But Nature, in due course of time, once moreShall here put on her beauty and her bloom.She leaves these objects to a slow decay,That what we are, and have been, may be known;But at the coming of the milder day,These monuments shall all be overgrown.

~ William Wordsworth

Its funny when people recently change their attitude to gain entrance into your heart, which may only ignite your passion to close the door.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

~ Paulo Coelho

Like vanishing dew,a passing apparitionor the sudden flashof lightning -- already gone --thus should one regard one's self.

~ Ikkyu

To know yourself you must know the transience of your self.

~ Ilyas Kassam

I am who I am.A coincidence no less unthinkablethan any other.I could have had differentancestors, after all.I could have flutteredfrom another nestor crawled bescaledfrom under another tree.Nature's wardrobeholds a fair supply of costumes:spider, seagull, field mouse.Each fits perfectly right offand is dutifully worninto shreds.

~ Wisława Szymborska

Though some may see their shortcomings as the greatest evil from the pit of hell, while some throw invectives at God for bringing them into a cruel, problematic world. These shortcomings are transient, the greatest evil does its work and needs no interrogation, their invectives are just a waste of time, and the world is the most sweetest to those with a functional taste buds.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.

~ Salman Rushdie

And these thingsthat 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.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Seize the day, then let it go.

~ Marty Rubin

Passing pleasures, like passing clouds, are all we have.

~ Marty Rubin

Pleasure, like the sparrow, never sits on any one branch too long.

~ Marty Rubin

Pleasure, in itself harmless, may become mischievous, by endearing to us a state which we know to be transient and probatory, and withdrawing our thoughts from that of which every hour brings us nearer to the beginning, and of which no length of time will bring us to the end. Mortification is not virtuous in itself, nor has any other use, but that it disengages us from the allurements of sense. In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire, there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint.

~ Samuel Johnson

Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.

~ Simon Reynolds

I believe in the brief eternity of the rose.

~ Marty Rubin

I sometimes think that never blows so redThe Rose as where some buried Caesar bled,That every Hyacinth the Garden wearsDropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.

~ Omar Khayyám

It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

~ Margaret Atwood

A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.

~ Juan Ramón Jiménez

Change is not made without inconvenience even from worse to better.

~ Richard Hooker

If you want things to stay as they are things will have to change.

~ Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring they carry them as silently away.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are three things which the public will always clamor for sooner or later: namely novelty novelty novelty.

~ Thomas Hood

There is nothing permanent except change.

~ Heraclitus