Quotes about Transience

The world is not a permanent home, it is only a temporary dwelling.

Catch, then, O catch the transient hour; Improve each moment as it flies!

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.

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.

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

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.

How quickly passes away the glory of this world.

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.

You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

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.

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.

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.