#Transience Quotes

“Every fair from fair sometime declines”

“Summer's lease hath all too short a date.”

“'Tis brief, my lord...as woman's love.”

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”

“Beauty's a doubtful good, a glass, a flower, Lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour; And beauty, blemish'd once, for ever's lost, In spite of physic, painting, pain, and cost.”

“A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent--sweet, not lasting; The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.”

“Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”

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

“Conversation is an evanescent relation,--no more.”

“You don't live on the earth, you are passing through it.”

“O the world is but a word; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone!”

“Swift as shadow, short as any dream”

“The summer's flower is to the summer sweet Though to itself it only live and die”

“So quick bright things come to confusion.​​​​​​”

“The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.”

“yet it seemsLife scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,But the torn petals strew the garden plot;And there's but common greenness after that.”

“Oh, how this spring of love resembleth, The uncertain glory of an April day, Which now shows all beauty of the Sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away”

“Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.”

“Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?”

“Man is in love and loveswhat vanishes,What more is there to say?”

“I see that nature offers us a solution to everything that we call a problem. If you can just find your own nature and live it as naturally as you possibly can and be in a state of awe over everything, it doesn't matter where you are. It almost speaks to you and says, "There's no reason to be upset about anything. It will pass." If it's really going to pass, why stay confused by it and depressed by it. Just watch it go. It's on its way out. That's what I began to do.”

“One had a lovely face,And two or three had charm,But charm and face were in vain.Because the mountain grassCannot keep the formWhere the mountain hare has lain.”

“Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.”

“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes”

“The world is nothing but a moment.”

“Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.”

“Our lives are but specks of dust falling through the fingers of time. Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

“Man's life is like a drop of dew on a leaf.”

“This entire most beautiful order of good things is going to pass away after its measure has been exhausted; for both morning and evening were made in them.”

“It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.”

“Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.”

“Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world; and not even here do all agree, no, not any one with himself: and the whole earth too is a point.”

“Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited.”

“Consider, for example, and you will find that almost all the transactions in the time of Vespasian differed little from those of the present day. You there find marrying and giving in marriage, educating children, sickness, death, war, joyous holidays, traffic, agriculture, flatterers, insolent pride, suspicions, laying of plots, longing for the death of others, newsmongers, lovers, misers, men canvassing far the consulship and for the kingdom; yet all these passed away, and are nowhere.”

“Infinity is a fathomless gulf, into which all things vanish.”

“All things fade and quickly turn to myth.”

“Time is like a handful of sand - the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers.”

“And yet, after all, what is posthumous fame? Altogether vanity.”

“Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names.”

“Run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend...or not even a legend. Think of all the examples. And how trivial the things we want so passionately are.”

“Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered. Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.”

“The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.”

“Life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.”

“He that dies in extreme old age will be reduced to the same state with him that is cut down untimely.”

“Life is a campaign, a brief staying in a strange region.”

“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.”

“The rottenness of the matter which is the foundation of everything!”

“Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.”

“In death, Alexander of Macedon's end differed no whit from his stable-boy's. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.”

“All things change, and you yourself are constantly wasting away. So also is the universe.”