Fleeting Nature of Time Quotes

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

If man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.

Each moment of every day is new and then it vanishes. Where is that day? Where is that moment?

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.

Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.

Tomorrow doesn't really exist.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

"What is the greatest surprise you have found about life?" a university student asked me several years ago. "The brevity of it," I replied without hesitation. Time moves so quickly, and no matter who we are or what we have done, the time will come when our lives will be over. As Jesus said, "As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work" (John 9:4).

Our days on earth are like a shadow, and the time of our affliction is the length of our days.

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

Maiden, that read'st this simple rhyme, Enjoy thy youth, it will not stay; Enjoy the fragrance of thy prime, For oh, it is not always May!

How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.

Full lasting is the song, though he, / The singer, passes.

Time itself made all things rare.

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.

Time is just a moment that we occupy in this brief spin around the planet.