Alexander Smith Quotes

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.

All human joys are swift of wing, For heaven doth so allot it; That when you get an easy thing, You find you haven't got it

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.

Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.

Good times don't last long sometimes.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

Men's fortunes are on a wheel, which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper for ever.

Don't take too much comfort in the fact that you're successful today because tomorrow could bring failure. There's no surety in life.

We go on in our pleasures thinking they're going to last forever.

The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.

And, hey, I'm not under the illusion that everything's just going to be hunky-dory work wise forever. I've never been under that illusion. Things could go away tomorrow.

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

Life is full of change and uncertainty. We know this. We experience it on a daily basis.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

The world's a scene of changes, and to be constant, in nature were inconstancy.

It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.

Stability is not the way of the world.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer.

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

History is a fickle lady.

These are the instructions you are getting today. It is only fair to tell you, however, that they may be changed tomorrow. And ten days later they may be changed back to the instructions you are getting now.