Best Transient Quotes & Sayings

All that I can say is, that the wisest and best men in all ages had agreed in giving the preference, very greatly, to the pleasures of intellect; and that my own experience completely confirmed the truth of their decisions; that I had found sensual pleasures vain, transient, and continually attended with tedium and disgust; but that intellectual pleasures appeared to me ever fresh and young, filled up all my hours satisfactorily, gave a new zest to life, and diffused a lasting serenity over my mind — Thomas Robert Malthus

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten. — Thomas Hardy

We all dimly feel that our transient historical identity is the only chance in all eternity to be alive as a somebody in a here and a now. We, therefore, dread the possibility, of which we are most aware when deeply young or very old, that at the end we may find that we have lived the wrong life or not really lived at all. — Erik Erikson

We are luminous beings. Beneath our transient physical bodies we are made of intelligent light. — Frederick Lenz

True discernment means not only distinguishing the right from the wrong; it means distinguishing the primary from the secondary, the essential from the indifferent, and the permanent from the transient. And, yes, it means distinguishing between the good and the better, and even between the better and the best. — Sinclair B. Ferguson

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts
its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things
as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty
but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge — G. Willow Wilson

Life is a funny thing. We claim it to be our own; but the truth is, it's not. It belongs to something much bigger. We, like everything else, are transient. This life is temporary and everything about us is temporary. What we call our life is nothing more than borrowed energy from something much bigger--nature, the universe, God--whatever floats your boat. And one day, when we pass, we will give that energy back to the world we borrowed it from in the first place. — Leanne Waters

Young girls today were more sensible, more sophisticated. Nowadays they worried more about their exam results and did their best to ensure they would have a decent career. For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction based as much as on narcissism as on sexual pleasure. Later, they would try to make a good marriage, basing their decision on a range of social and professional criteria as well as shared interests and tastes. Of course, in doing this, they cut themselves from any possibility of happiness - a condition indissociable from traditional and transient emotions which are incompatible with the practice of reason - but in doing so they hoped to escape the moral and emotional suffering which had so tortured their forebears. — Michel Houellebecq

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. — Samuel Johnson

Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action. — James Luceno

As the love of him who is love transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another's. He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient. — George MacDonald

I think people are transient. Back in the early church, there was a 'stick and stay' mentality. In this day and time, people have a fast food mentality of ministry. If it doesn't fit them or if it doesn't fit in their schedule, they'll move on to something else. That's a norm in today's time. — Marvin Sapp

The essential part of our being can only survive if the transient part dissolves. Death is a condition of survival. That which has been gained must be eternalized, and can only be eternalized by being transmuted, by passing through death they must return — Vilayat Inayat Khan

The glorified will not be pilgrims, transient visitors, or tenants at will, but settled, permanent, walled, established by title, through eternity by warrantee deed, signed, sealed, recorded, possession given. No renters, no lessees of Heaven, but all property and home owners. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion. — Robert Genn

Love, I've discovered is a transient emotion best satisfied by a good fuck. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart. — Truman Capote

The next-to-last sentence that the Buddha is reported to have spoken as he was dying, before his final sentence of encouragement to his community, was Transient are all conditioned things. — Sylvia Boorstein

conversations each year with fellow participants confirmed my hunch: the powerful are experiencing increasingly greater limits on their power. The reactions to my probing always pointed in the same direction: power is becoming more feeble, transient, and constrained. — Moises Naim

All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They're adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one. — Sylvain Cappell

Balance is the ability to be happy in the midst of the most chaotic or even boring or transient circumstance. — Frederick Lenz

Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny. — Stephen Jay Gould

Life, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
Foretells a pleasant day.

Sometimes there are clouds of gloom,
But these are transient all;
If the shower will make the roses bloom,
O why lament its fall ?

Rapidly, merrily,
Life's sunny hours flit by,
Gratefully, cheerily,
Enjoy them as they fly !

What though Death at times steps in
And calls our Best away ?
What though sorrow seems to win,
O'er hope, a heavy sway ?

Yet hope again elastic springs,
Unconquered, though she fell;
Still buoyant are her golden wings,
Still strong to bear us well.

Manfully, fearlessly,
The day of trial bear,
For gloriously, victoriously,
Can courage quell despair ! — Charlotte Bronte

How often we have had cause to regret that the histrionic art, of all the fine arts the most intense in its immediate effect, should be, of all others, the most transient in its result! - and the only memorials it can leave behind, at best, so imperfect and so unsatisfactory! — Anna Brownell Jameson

I don't see myself as having made the transition. I aim to be more transient than transitional. Life is constantly changing, now at a rate faster than ever, so being in a transitory state is the best way to keep pace. — Marc Forster

[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographic situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to govern themselves." Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. but differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development. — Will Durant

Reflect upon the defects of your character: thoroughly realize their evils and the transient pleasures they give you, and firmly will that you shall try your best not to yield to them the next time. — H. P. Blavatsky

[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra's infinite variety. — Clifton Fadiman

The Human Condition has a vacancy ... a transient declaring It's Self The Victor! Till death do us part in This War for human isolation. — Rosemarie Yusen

When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst. — George Eliot

Life is transient but memory is eternal. — Debasish Mridha

Though Jack Nubbins was extremely talented, Quenten Cassidy had viewed the Specter; when he reached down through the familiar layers of gloom and fatigue he generally found more there than a nameless and transient desire to acquire plastic trophies. He and Nubbins were not even in the same ball park. — John L. Parker Jr.

Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within ... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, "the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad — Huston Smith

Knowledge of the Enlightenment Cycle, of the ways that inner dimensions and nirvana work, lifts you far above the transient sorrows, pains, pleasures and joys that the unenlightened masses experience. — Frederick Lenz

When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren't a character in some writer's story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe's head, or a momentary mote in God's eye? — Stephen King

Los Angeles is a very transient town. It's the only place I know where you can actually rent a dog. — Rita Rudner

I know change is possible, I know there is an alternative, because I live a completely different life to the one I was born with. I also know that the solution is not fame or money or any transient adornment of the individual. The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun. — Russell Brand

The thought of the future life with its prerogatives and joys helps to make the trials of the present seem light and transient. — Billy Graham

No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams. — Abraham Verghese

Sidney remembered how strikingly original the poem was. For George Herbert, the time we spend on earth is not all too brief and transient but too long: because it detains human beings from a life outside time and with God. — James Runcie

All of us inevitably spend our lives evolving from an initial to a final stage of dependence. If we are fortunate enough to achieve power and relative independence along the way, it is a transient and passing glory. — Willard Gaylin

He knew how she felt. It was the way he felt himself, sometimes, if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion. A time when you knew you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall. — Terry Pratchett

Unlike the transient days of our lives that constantly come and go, nirvana has always been, is now, and always will be. — Frederick Lenz

The directions for meditation that Sri Krishna gives are very exacting. He tells Arjuna exactly how to get past all the things that cause suffering and transient pleasure to something that is perpetual ecstasy. His directions are that exact. — Frederick Lenz

Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace. — George MacDonald

The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing by sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully-defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface. — Margaret Atwood

The first and the most important thing is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms, countless in number, are transient and brittle. The life everlasting is independent of any form but manifests itself in all forms. Life then does not die ... but the forms are dissolved. — Sri Aurobindo

Yeah." I took another deep breath. "I'm gonna die, Emma."
"You mean eventually, right?" She blinked, and I could tell it hadn't sunk in. "Please tell me you're making some kind of big-picture philosophical
statement about the inevitability of death and the transient nature of human existence."
"Not eventually, Em. Sometime on Thursday. — Rachel Vincent

We have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me
just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable ... — Amal El-Mohtar

Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother? — Orson Scott Card

What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms. — Thomas Sowell