Transience Quotes

We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; Today will die tomorrow; Time stoops to no man’s lure.

Listen, all creeping things, the bell of transience.

As generations come and go, Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, And feeble, of themselves, decay.

Never mind the transience of show business and popularity. When we hear Ray Charles, we go, ‘That’s a great singer.’ You don’t need a reporter or a writer to tell us. Good is good and it should shine through the years.

Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

Nothing mortal is enduring, and there is nothing sweet which does not presently end in bitterness.

But life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last.

Cheat me not with time,
with the dull ache of flesh,
for all flesh turns,
even the loveliest
ankle and frail thigh,
to bitterest dust.

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

Joy and sorrow, beauty and deformity, equally pass away.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

Ambition is a meteor-gleam; Fame a restless airy dream; Pleasures, insects on the wing Round Peace, th’ tend rest flow’r of spring.

Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he’s something innately superior, something eternal–and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

A ruin is not just something that happened long ago to someone else; its history is that of us all, the transience of power, of ideas, of all human endeavors.

yet it seems
Life 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.

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an
end

The likeness of the world? A shadow! And world’s glory? A dream!

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.

What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker.

No reliance can be placed on the friendship of kings, nor vain hope put in the melodious voice of boys; for that passes away like a vision, and this vanishes like a dream.

Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

Every great work of art … is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

Friendships offer good practice in accepting the transience of experience and the persistence of feeling.

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.

We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream is man, no more.

Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die