66 Transience Quotes

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.

Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead - When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed.

There is nothing beyond God, and the sense enjoyments are simply something through which we are passing now in the hope of getting better things.

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, The brilliant moon and all the milky sky, And all that famous harmony of leaves, Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

Loveliest of lovely things are they, On earth, that soonest pass away. The rose that lives its little hour Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.

As it is so strangely ordained in this world, what is amusing will turn into being gloomy, if you stand too long before it, and then God knows what ideas may not stray into the mind... Why is it that even in moments of unthinking, careless gaiety a different and strange mood comes upon one?

What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps 'Oh look at that!' Then - whoosh, and I'm gone... and they'll never see anything like it ever again... and they won't be able to forget me - ever.

How does the light of a star set out and plunge into black eternity in its immortal course? The star dies, but the light never dies; such also is the cry of freedom. Out of the transient encounter of contrary forces which constitute your existence, strive to create whatever immortal thing a mortal may create in this world - a Cry. And this Cry, abandoning to the earth the body which gave it birth, proceeds and labors eternally.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity. [p.277]

And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love, And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men's souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, Lives on this lonely face.

Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room As though dried straw, and if we turn about The bare chimney is gone black out Because the work had finished in that flare. Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, As 'twere all life's epitome. What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

Wild is the music of the autumnal wind Among the faded woods.

If Aims impel these Astral Ones The ones allowed to know Know that which makes them as forgot As Dawn forgets them - now

But pleasures are like poppies spread- You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river- A moment white-then melts forever.

I am one of you and being one of you Is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings, Like watery words awash; like meanings said By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not, Myself, only half a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition appareled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament.

You picked the wrong guy baby if you're too fly/You need to hit the door, search for a new guy/Cause I only got one night in town/Break out or be clown

To come alive again, one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland. Certain mornings, on turning a corner, a delightful dew falls on the heart and then evaporates. But its coolness remains, and this is what the heart requires always. I had to set out again.

And draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.

Alas! the great world goes its way, And takes its truth from each new day; They do not quit, nor can retain, Far less consider it again.

The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry To go our devious secret ways, forgetting Those many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed, We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves. The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.

Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shatters, and he would go down the path and on to the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain.

To have seen you and your unforgotten face, Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray, Pure as white lilies in a watery space, It were something, though you went from me today. To have known the things that from the weak are furled, Perilous ancient passions, strange and high; It is something to be wiser than the world, It is something to be older than the sky.

Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' - Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' - The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' - Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.'

The very clouds have wept and died And only God is in the sky.

You look like an angel, Sleeping it off at a station. Were you only passing through?

Just like a photograph, I pick you up. Just like a station on the radio, I pick you up.

And thou wert lovely to the last, Extinguish'd, not decay'd; As stars that shoot along the sky Shine brightest as they fall from high.

Standing on the bridge that crosses The river that goes out to the sea The wind is full of a thousand voices They pass by the bridge and me.

I lost myself to him and laid my face upon my lover's breast And care and grief grew dim as in the morning's mist became the light There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair.

You are not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of clay, a thousand-year-old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain.

Do you like her? I think that I understood that she didn't want to be liked. As if she were a visitor who expected to go back home any day.

I think, ofttimes, that lives of men may be Likened to wandering winds that come and go Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee.

Estas que fueron pompa y alegria despertando al albor de la manana, a la tarde seran lastima vana durmiendo en brazos de la noche fria.

Ne durat-il qu'un jour, ma gloire est sans seconde D'etre du moins un jour la maitresse du monde.

Fair pledges of a fruitful tree, Why do ye fall so fast? Your date is not so past But you may stay yet here awhile To blush and gently smile, And go at last.

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away.

For what is a flower but life's expressed passion for itself. Sudden and brief, but certain and eternal at the same time

Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti in vente et rapida scribere oportet aqua

Forever goes quick.

The downfall of Beaconfieldism is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance.

'When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again.'

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history,' but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

The light came through the window, Straight from the sun above, And so inside my little room There plunged the rays of Love. In streams of light I clearly saw The dust you seldom see, Out of which the Nameless makes A Name for one like me.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'' 'The mood will pass, sir.'

Fortuna uitrea est: tum cum splendet frangitur.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.