Transience Quotes

I find life so shocking in general. Everything about it surprises me.

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Nothing is lasting but change; nothing perpetual but death.

When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

In the long run we are all dead.

It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.

Democracy is like a street car. You get off when you reach your destination.

Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.

The road is better than the inn.

If things were not impermanent, life would not be possible.

All your seriousness is about sandcastles. And you yourself will leave them one day, trampling them down, and you will not look back. The people who take it seriously miss the beauty of playfulness.