Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow; acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separation; births in death. Knowing this, one should, from the very first, renounce acquisitions and storing-up, and building, and meeting; and, faithful to the commands of an eminent Guru, set about realizing the Truth. That alone is the best of religious observances.

Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

Death is not the enemy of life, but its friend, for it is the knowledge that our years are limited which makes them so precious. It is the truth that time is but lent to us which makes us, at our best, look upon our years as a trust handed into our temporary keeping.

We're only immortal for a limited time.

All perishable is but an allegory.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

How quickly passes away the glory of this world.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Sooner or later everything has to come to an end.

Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.

Everything in life is just for a while.

Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:-- We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf.

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.

Even though in the world you are the most learned scholar of the time, Behold the vanishing of this world and this time!

Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.

But life is short: while one lives, everything is lacking; when one is dead, everything is superfluous.