Quotes about Transience
The world is not a permanent home, it is only a temporary dwelling.
- Billy Graham
Catch, then, O catch the transient hour; Improve each moment as it flies!
- St. Jerome
Clearly we must not be attached to anything, no matter how innocent, because it will slip from our grasp when least expected; nothing but the eternal can content us.
- St. Therese of Lisieux
We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.
- Henry David Thoreau
The worldly comforts are not for me. I am like a traveler, who takes a rest under a tree in the shade and then goes on his way
- Anonymous
The Enlightened one has told you in never-to-be-forgotten words that this little span of life is but a passing shadow, a fleeting thing.
- Mahatma Gandhi
How quickly passes away the glory of this world.
- Thomas a Kempis
Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.
- Frederick Buechner
You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.
- Marcus Aurelius
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 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.
- Marcus Aurelius
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.
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditate upon what you ought to be in body and soul when death overtakes you; meditate on the brevity of life, and the measureless gulf of eternity behind it and before, and upon the frailty of everything material.
- Marcus Aurelius