Transient Existence Quotes

Whatever I own is temporary, since we're only here for a short period of time. It's what we do and produce, it's our actions that will last forever. That's real value.

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

All objects exist in a moment of time.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

People say, 'Where do you live?' and I say that theoretically, I live in London, but basically that's just where I go to change my suitcase. Otherwise, I'm always flying somewhere.

I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.

I've never really felt at home in L.A. I've only been here to work, and then I immediately go back to New York.

I had a gypsy upbringing, so I moved around all over the place and can't remember a street I grew up on.

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.

Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

You think you can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. . . . . We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

I am a Chicagoan. I feel like I've simply been on vacation for 10 years in Los Angeles. But Chicago is a real place, and L.A. is a motel.

She seemed fragile like a moonflower – destined to bloom for a single lovely night, and then to fade and fall.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

Property is unstable, and youth perishes in a moment. Life itself is held in the grinning fangs of Death, Yet men delay to obtain release from the world. Alas, the conduct of mankind is surprising.

We are an episode between two oblivions.

I spent my thirties living out of boxes and moving every six months to a year. It was my cloud period: I just wandered like a cloud for ten years, following the food supply. I was a hunter, gatherer, an academic migrant.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.