Baltasar Gracian Quotes

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two - is gone.

When Fortune smiles, I smile to think how quickly she will frown.

I made enough money to buy a house. That's crazy, but fame proved ephemeral.

Happiness is brief. It will not stay. God batters at its sails.

But acting is very much a profession that is you're hot one moment and not the next - and that is totally cool. I think that's what I find most fascinating and most exciting about it - is that it can be gone in a puff of smoke.

It's marvellous to be popular, but foolish to think it will last.

Success, I've come to realise, is fleeting so you shouldn't value it too much.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

Fortune is like glass - the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.

Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter - Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes - A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting.

So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

I am a temporary amusement.

I don't believe in stardom; it is like a relationship. Today it is with you, tomorrow it might go to someone else.

I see people every day who think they're the be all and end all of the industry. I've seen so many people come and go, but the industry doesn't revolve around one person.

I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

When a man is a favorite of Fortune she never takes him unawares, and, however astonishing her favors may be, she finds him ready.

The highest happiness, the purest joys of life, wear out at last.

Everything can be undone, including success.

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment.

Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. They flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.