Quotes about Transience

How many more, I must ask myself, such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness?

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

Can we simply address what it means to be human? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts up in the form of a human sentient body and being and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that) and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential?

How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.

All is ephemeral--fame and the famous as well.

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man—yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

Let nothing disturb you nothing frighten you all things are passing God never changes.

We cannot truly face life until we face the fact that it will be taken away from us.

Therefore nothing were better for us than soon to be conveyed to the last dance, and covered with shovels.

Creation is good, but it is not God. It is beautiful, but its beauty is at present transient. It is in pain, but that pain is taken into the very heart of God and becomes part of the pain of new birth.

My life's harvest is not the building material for anything, neither in my time, now, nor in any other, never.