Douglas William Jerrold Quotes

Celebrity was a long time in coming; it will go away. Everything goes away.

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

Our time on Earth is so random.

The present will not long endure.

The kindly light has a brief period of shining.

Stop and consider! life is but a day

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

Everything is temporary if you give it enough time.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.

All glory is fleeting.

Days are coloured bubbles that float upon the surface of fathomless nights.

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

No effect of work can be eternal.

Nothing is so fickle and uncertain as popularity. It is here today and gone tomorrow. It is a sandy foundation, and sure to fail those who build upon it.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.