Transient Beauty Quotes

The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

This autumn- why am I growing old? bird disappearing among clouds.

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

Women are as roses, whose fair flower, being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!

Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.

How quickly passes away the glory of this world.

A poet sees things in two ways: First, as a child who never saw it before, and Second, as a dying man who will never see it again.

Better a life like a falling star, brief bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

Spring is like a perhaps hand

it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained of those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth and yet last the longest in the dust.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

In France, they call the beauty of youth 'the evil beauty.' You don't have it because of you but because you're born with it. The other kind of beauty is your own work, and it takes forever.

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

I like to create a sound and then leave it behind.