Booth Tarkington Quotes

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

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.

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

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.

Lives are mere blips on the canvas of eternity.

Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet .

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?

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.

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 .

Once, once for all, if you would save your heart from breaking, learn this lesson once for all you must cease, in this world, to believe in the eternity of any creed or form at all. Whatever grows in time is a child of time, and is born and lives, and dies at its appointed day like ourselves.

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.

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

Time stays, we go.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it's like a vapor.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

Robert, you are just a transient. I have seen them come and I have seen them go and I’ll be here long after you have gone.

Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.

Everything in life is just for a while.

I think we all lose in the end because we don't get to stay here forever.

For mortal kind taketh thought only for the day, and hath no more surety than the shadow of smoke.

Life's temporary for a reason, it gets boring after awhile.