Ephemeral Existence Quotes

Like the dew on the mountain, like the foam on the river, like the bubble on the fountain, thou art gone, and for ever!

Life is short and art is long.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

This world is a vaporous jest at best, Tossed off by the gods in laughter, And a cruel attempt at wit were it, If nothing better came after.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

We are all here on this planet, as it were, as tourists. None of us can live here forever. The longest we might live is a hundred years. So while we are here we should try to have a good heart and to make something positive and useful of our lives. Whether we live just a few years or a whole century, it would be truly regrettable and sad if we were to spend that time aggravating the problems that afflict other people, animals, and the environment. The most important things is to be a good human being.

The part of life which we really live is short.

We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.

And a man's life's no more than to say "One."

The thing that I would say is that U.S. power is not eternal. I am not saying that it won't come to an end. Because it will.

A day lays low and lifts up again all human things.

The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness.

Think about how rare it is that you exist at all. Also think about time this way: If something exists, even for a second, then forever in the future that thing “existed”, and forever in the past that thing “was going to exist”. So to even be conscious for a millisecond is a kind of immortality, but you have more than a millisecond. You have minutes. Hours. Months. A year? Years! This is a gift.

For this I see, that we, all we that live, Are but vain shadows, unsubstantial dreams.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

Life is a winking light in the darkness.

I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

For every minute, the future is becoming the past.

You are permanent, but this life is not.

When we see the many grave-stones which have fallen in, which have been defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the ruins of the churches, that have themselves crumbled together over them; we may fancy the life after death to be as a second life, into which man enters in the figure, or the picture or the inscription, and lives longer there than when he was really alive. But this figure also, this second existence, dies out too, sooner or later. Time will not allow himself to be cheated of his rights with the monuments of men or with themselves.

Time says hush: by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now? Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all: the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all.

it is the nature of stars to cross