Saint Augustine Quotes

Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.

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

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

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

The seed of mortals broods o'er passing things, and hath nought surer than the smoke-cloud's shadow.

O the world is but a word; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone!

We're only immortal for a limited time.

We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

The river where you set your foot just now is gone-those waters give way to this, now this.

There is nothing in the whole world which abides. All things are in a state of ebb and flow, and every shadow passes away. Even time itself, like a river, is constantly gliding away .

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.

Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.

Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

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.

Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues. Ten minutes later you throw them away and they are gone.

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

Your ego may be just a soap bubble. Maybe for a few seconds it will remain, rising higher in the air. Perhaps for a few seconds it may have a rainbow, but it is only for a few seconds. In this infinite and eternal existence your egos go on bursting every moment. It is better not to have any attachment with soap bubbles.

Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.

That which has a beginning will surely have an end.

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory - and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.

Terrestrial happiness is of short duration. The brightness of the flame is wasting its fuel; the fragrant flower is passing away in its own odors.

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment.