Marcel Proust Quotes

The temporal quality of all things was being firmly impressed upon me.

You can't halt time.

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

We're all expendable. We think the world's going to stop when a pope dies, or a king. And then... life goes on.

Time stays, we go.

Faith, sir, we are here today, and gone tomorrow.

Time destroys everything.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

It's a mantra I've lived by for as long as I can remember. Nothing lasts for ever.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

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

All things are the same, familiar in enterprise, momentary in endurance, coarse in substance. All things now are as they were in the day of those whom we have buried.

Alas, Postumus, the fleeting years slip by, nor will piety give any stay to wrinkles and pressing old age and untamable death.

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.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.

Can any one find in what condition his body will be, I do not say a year hence, but this evening?

Life is a frail moth flying Caught in the web of the years that pass.

This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, "This, too, will pass away.

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

Not to hope for things to last forever, is what the year teaches and even the hour which snatches a nice day away.

All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.

Nothing is permanent.