Quotes about Transience
One man after burying another has been laid out dead, and another buries him; and all this in a short time. To conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.
- Marcus Aurelius
In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.
- Marcus Aurelius
Soon you'll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice, truth—"gone from the earth and only found in heaven." Why are you still here? Sensory objects are shifting and unstable; our senses dim and easily deceived
- Marcus Aurelius
How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them;
- Marcus Aurelius
As the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands, so in life the events which go before are soon covered by those which come after.
- Marcus Aurelius
And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again.
- Marcus Aurelius
What death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature;
- Marcus Aurelius
Remember this: in no time at all both you and he will be dead, and shortly after that not even our names will remain.
- Marcus Aurelius
Suppose that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow "or the day after." Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn't kick up a fuss about which day it was—what difference could it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.
- Marcus Aurelius
Come tutte le cose rapidamente svaniscano, nel cosmo i corpi stessi, nel tempo il loro ricordo;
- Marcus Aurelius
We too will inevitably end up where so many eloquent orators have gone, so many distinguished philosophers (Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates), so many heroes of old, and so many generals and tyrants
- Marcus Aurelius
Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.
- Marcus Aurelius