Ephemeral Life Quotes & Sayings

Life is eternal but death is ephemeral and transitional. — Debasish Mridha

When the universe is ephemeral, one can easily feel that human existence is meaningless. Why should I do anything at all?
On the other hand it is tempting to try and make the best of it. I'm here, anyway. The imagination won't cope if I try to picture where I'd otherwise be. — Erlend Loe

Ephemeral spectator of an eternal spectacle, man raises for a second his eyes to Heaven, and closes them for ever; but, during that rapid second that is granted to him, from all the quarters of Heaven, and from the outer limits of the Universe, a consoling ray darts from each world and meets his eyes, to announce to him that some connection exists between him and infinity, and that even he is linked to eternity. — Xavier De Maistre

This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph. — Bill Jay

Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as may pursue the study of us. — Rafael Sabatini

The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life ... These realities are increasingly under attack from powerful forces, which threaten to disfigure God's plan for creation. — Pope Francis

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar. — Roberto Bolano

Eros and Thanatos were always the source of his inspiration, even though, from this time on, they usually appear in the guise of two simple and fundamental themes: flowers and women. These themes offered him the greatest opportunity to give a certain permanence to all that can be grasped in passing: an ephemeral sensual joy, the ecstasy of life. — Gilles Neret

Death doesn't frighten me, except to make me feel that life is ephemeral. — Miranda France

Everyone was certain that Engineer Safa would go chasing after his wife or he would die of sorrow. Not so. The engineer neither chased after her nor died of sorrow. He shrugged and said, 'The hell with her.' At first, people were puzzled, but then they remembered that life is a sequence of ephemeral events and a succession of fleeting loves. — Goli Taraghi

To embrace the contingency of one's life is to embrace one's fate as an ephemeral but sentient being. As Nietzsche claimed, one can come to love that fate. But to do so one must first embrace it, though one instinctively recoils at such a prospect. — Stephen Batchelor

If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.
Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life's so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some. — Robyn Davidson

The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a spec of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe. — Sri Aurobindo

This is life, ephemeral, transient. Just because it's gone doesn't mean it didn't happen. — Michelle Gable

It seems to me that life's circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths; and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as you read. — Madame De Stael

Life is ephemeral; each moment passes quickly, a blur of color on a fast moving subway car. There and gone and all we are left with is the imprint of what once was. — Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt — Jack Kerouac

Those who have been too long at their labor, who have drunk too long
at the cup of voluptuousness, who feel they have become temporarily
inhumane, who are tormented by their families, who find life sad and
love ephemeral ... they should all eat chocolate and they will be
comforted. — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Now let us look to the ancient inhabitants of India. With them, first of all, religion was not only one interest by the side of many. It was the all-absorbing interest; it embraced not only worship and prayer, but what we call philosophy, morality, law, and government, - all was pervaded by religion. Their whole life was to them a religion - everything else was, as it were, a mere concession made to the ephemeral requirements of this life. — Friedrich Max Muller

Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone. — Edwin Way Teale

He nods, looking through the pictures on the screen on the back of his camera. Some relationships can only exist as memories. But unlike ephemeral digital images that can be sorted and deleted, we can't erase the past. We have to learn to live with all the images that are stored in love's archive, memories tagged good and bad. No Photoshopping. Accept the negative before moving forward. — Shannon Mullen

Life is transient and ephemeral so dance in your own way. — Debasish Mridha

Life is so transient and ephemeral; we will not be here after a breath. So think better, think deeply, think with kindness, and write it with love so that it may live a little longer. — Debasish Mridha

What you see with your eyes are transient and ephemeral,
What you see through your heart is everlasting and eternal. — Debasish Mridha

Why have I
thought the dew
Ephemeral when I
Shall rest so short a time, myself,
On earth? — Adelaide Crapsey

[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral. — Samuel Beckett

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo
It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered. — Alice Walker

Life is like a snowflake - transient, translucent, adventurous, ephemeral, and beautiful. — Debasish Mridha

I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there's nothing that's lovely, and if there's nothing that's just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what's the point? — Arundhati Roy

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless. — Colson Whitehead

Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do. — Vikram Seth

Oh, my God,' she said, between sobs. 'Oh, my God.'
Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna's grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo's house. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos - all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs. — Bertrand Russell

In our narrow, confined existence, we tend to forget the essence of life ... All of us, whatever our occupation or class, are equally guilty: the employer is lost in the running of his business; the workers, sunk in the abyss of their misery, raise their heads only to cry in protest; we, the politicians, are lost in daily battles and corridor intrigues. All of us forget that before everything else, we are men, ephemeral beings lost in the immense universe, so full of terrors. We are inclined to neglect the search for the real meaning of life, to ignore the real goals - serenity of the spirit and sublimity of the heart ... To reach them - that is the revolution. — Jean Jaures

Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair. — Karl Lagerfeld

I realized that loving people, depending on them, NEEDING them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It's the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you decide that everything's going to be fine. We're all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life's so unpredictable. — Dean Koontz

What is it like to feel Tao? It is an effortless flowing, a sweeping momentum. It is like bird song soaring and gliding over a vast landscape. You can feel this in your life: Events will take on a perfect momentum, a glorious cadence. You can feel it in your body: The energy will rise up in you in a thrilling crescendo, setting your very nerves aglow. You can feel it in your spirit: You will enter a state of such perfect grace that you will resound over the landscape of reality like ephemeral bird song.
When Tao comes to you in this way, ride it for all that you are worth. Don't interfere. Don't stop - that brings failure, alienation, and regret. Don't try to direct it. Let it flow and follow it. When the Tao is with you, put aside all other concerns. As long as the song lasts, follow. Just follow. — Ming-Dao Deng

People were unable to appreciate the worth of what was profound and stable which provided them with a safe anchor, so ruminated Mahendra. On the other hand, people foolishly ran after what was ephemeral and deceptive which gave one no real contentment - life's most desirable prize! — Sukhendu Ray

...the bittersweet reminder of life's ephemeral pleasures, of opportunities that pass...These experiences would never be repeated and for that I was sad to see them go. But I also relished in the pricelessness of things so unique. That which can be duplicated loses its gold. — Kevin Revolinski

Death is the end of our ephemeral life and beginning of infinite eternal life. — Debasish Mridha

Attraction is often mistaken to be love.
If you're in a relationship doesn't necessarily mean you're in love. And what do you do when that ephemeral attraction is long gone?
What people call break-ups are nothing more but the realization that you didn't love them at the first place ...
Shouldn't you have been more careful before making those empty promises? — Sanhita Baruah

But nothing could be held true for the rest of one's life, every coveted thing in the end was maya, illusion, a myth, and this the great sages of India had always understood --- little was real. We were put on this earth transitorily; we deposited our genes in offspring; deluded ourselves that we would be missed when we were gone; pretended that money, wealth, titles, and land were to be desired. But every such thing was ephemeral, prone to change. The only reason to live was love. — Indu Sundaresan

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose — Martin Seligman

I admit,' said Spite, 'to a certain melancholy when visiting vibrant cities, as is this Darujhistan. A long life teaches one just how ephemeral is such thriving glory. Why, I have come again upon cities I knew well in the age of their greatness, only to find crumbled walls, dust and desolation.'
Cutter bared his teeth and said, 'Darujhistan has stood for two thousand years and it will stand for another two thousand-even longer.'
Spite nodded. 'Precisely. — Steven Erikson

It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium. — Hans Arp

Most dreams die a slow death. They're conceived in a moment of passion, with the prospect of endless possibility, but often languish and are not pursued with the same heartfelt intensity as when first born. Slowly, subtly, a dream becomes elusive and ephemeral. People who've lost their own dreams become pessimists and cynics. They feel like the time and devotion spent on chasing their dreams were wasted. The emotional scars last forever. — Dean Karnazes

There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason. — James Lee Burke

Before the discovery of these [underwater] vents, all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth, was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis. But down there, there is no sun, there is no photosynthesis; it's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it, and it's all so ephemeral. — Mike DeGruy

I've learned that the greatest threat to love is not circumstance but the absence of attentions. For we do not neglect others because we have ceased to love; rather we ceased to love others because we have neglected them. I've learned that each day is a miracle unearned. I've learned that while life is ephemeral-a vapor- LOVE is not. In short, I have learned what matters and what does not. — Richard Paul Evans

The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas - to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us — Paul Murray

When we are able to realize that life is endless and not ephemeral and that life is transformational and not static - then all fears will vanish from our hearts. — Debasish Mridha

If only I can realize how ephemeral my life is, then I will never be able to hurt anyone. — Debasish Mridha

Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I'm living the life of a fruit fly - the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a "fresh start" that leads to the same moribund conclusions. — Julie Schumacher

Sometimes, when I play music, I feel as if I am giving life ... It isn't just notes on the paper anymore: you are recreating the thought, transmitting it. It becomes shareable, but it can never be kept. You go through and at the same time you let go of the experience. That is part of the wonder of music: it can never be kept; it is ephemeral and at the same time enduring. — Hephzibah Menuhin

I don't remember the rest of the dance. It's lost along with all the other insignificant passing seconds of my life. Me. Steven. Ty. Ticking away. I didn't know to savor that moment on the dance floor, to understand how beautiful and rare it was, how fragile, how ephemeral, when Ty was happy. When we were all happy, and we were together, and we were safe.
I didn't know.
I didn't know. — Cynthia Hand

But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last. — Prince

[For the French] time ... is an ephemeral currency and should be spent doing the things that make life worth living. — Debra Ollivier

Say no to an ephemeral, superficial and throwaway culture, a culture that assumes that you are incapable of taking on responsibility and facing the great challenges of life! — Pope Francis

The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup
this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion: is this not something we all aspire to? And something that, in our western civilization, we do not know how to attain?
The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life. — Muriel Barbery

Remember, pain and misery
are transient and ephemeral
but love has the healing power,
which is eternal. — Debasish Mridha

I'll destroy the ephemeral. — Diego

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. — Arthur Schopenhauer

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere. — Robert Charles Wilson

In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe. — Muriel Barbery

Definitions must agree, not with egos, but with life. Mr. Burroughs goes on the basis that a definition is something hard and fast, absolute and eternal. He forgets that all the universe is in flux; that definitions are arbitrary and ephemeral; that they fix, for a fleeting instant of time, things that in the past were not, that in the future will be not, that out of the past become, and that out of the present pass on to the future and become other things. Definitions cannot rule life. Definitions cannot be made to rule life. Life must rule definitions or else the definitions perish. — Jack London

What Sri Krishna is saying, is that it's a terrible mistake to believe that this life we lead is real. Obviously it's real, but it doesn't last very long in its realness. It's very ephemeral and to mistaken the forms of life, the shapes that life takes, for reality, is not wise. — Frederick Lenz

It's the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful. — Yoshida Kenko

You make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish, its just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, all
disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought,
history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions
and systems. Its always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out
of it? And what will you make? what are you looking for? There is no Truth.
There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral
action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and
contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,
stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend? — Blaise Cendrars

No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us. — Krishna Udayasankar

Metal. In some ways, that was the true mark of mankind. Man tamed the stones, the bones of the earth below. Man tamed the fire, that ephemeral, consuming soul of life. And combining the two, he drew forth the marrow of the rocks themselves, then made molten tools. — Brandon Sanderson

A cherry pie is ... ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life. — Nick Harkaway

One who has loved truly, can never lose entirely. Love is whimsical and temperamental. Its nature is ephemeral, and transitory. It comes when it pleases,and goes away without warning. Accept and enjoy it while it remains, but spend no time worrying about its departure. Worry will never bring it back. — Napoleon Hill

Love is the law of God. You live that you may learn to love. You love
that you may learn to live. No other lesson is required of Man.You are
the tree of Life. Beware of fractionating yourselves. Set not a fruit against a fruit, a leaf against a leaf, a bough against a bough; nor
set the stem against the roots; nor set the tree against the mother-
soil. That is precisely what you do when you love one part more than
the rest, or to the exclusion of the rest. No love is possible except
by the love of self. No self is real save the All-embracing Self.
Therefore is God all Love, because he loves himself. So long as you
are pained by Love, you have not found your real self, nor have you
found the golden key of Love. Because you love an ephemeral self, your
love is ephemeral. — Mikhail Naimy

For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present for the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth. — James George Frazer

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. — Anne Thaxter Eaton

I realize I'm just a silly stranger goofing with other strangers for no reason far away from anything that ever mattered to me what that was
Always an ephemeral "visitor" to the Coast nevery really involved with anyone's lives there because I'm always ready to fly back across the country but not to any life of my own on the other end either, just a traveling stranger like Old Bull Balloon ... (p. 178) — Jack Kerouac

I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you. — Billie Jean King

Life is ephemeral like the journey of a dew drop. We must not forget to glitter. — Debasish Mridha

Here, day was not the decorous successor to night known to us at home, lazily resuming sway over a drowsy world when the darkness thins and dies, bequeathing its lost kingdom to the unwilling light. This struggling, sun-born life in forest, swamp and teeming air was too urgent and too ephemeral to wait for the going of night before resuming its unchanging day-labor of growth, fruition and exhaustion once more. Day extended its reign into the darkness, stealing precious time from the night, and when the sky paled perceptibly at last the feeling of full day was already abroad on this impatient earth. — E. Arnot Robertson

He could focus my attention on how perfectly sublime life can be at times. Such moments are ephemeral, and without his guidance I might have missed many of them, working so hard to get somewhere that I would fail to recognize when I had arrived. — Kevin Hearne

The Shadow is what people are hunting throughout the tale. Or else it can dog the hero, refusing to leave him alone. It's a potent force that bewitches as much as it torments. It can lead to hell or heaven. It's the hollow forever inside you, never filled. It's everything in life you can't touch, hold on to, so ephemeral and painful it makes you gasp. You might even glimpse it for a few seconds before it's gone. Yet the image will live with you. You'll never forget it as long as you live. It's what you're terrified of and paradoxically what you're looking for. We are nothing without our shadows. They give our otherwise pale, blinding world definition. They allow us to see what's right in front of us. Yet they'll haunt us until we're dead. — Marisha Pessl

It struck me tonight how music mirrors life. Fleeting ephemeral moments, made up of beauty, sadness, joy, hope and despair. Melodies which are written in both major and minor keys. Flowing and fleeting. You can't hold onto it, or keep it from changing. Our emotions possess the evanescence of a note. — Virginia Burges

Nietzsche ... argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe ... who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil. — John Carroll

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. — C. G. Jung

Being more mature now, I've managed to make peace with my past, as it's making peace with me. Certainly there's a mutual gain for reflecting on both phases of my life, and although I consider the here and now perhaps to be more important, there are still many people who appreciate my past ephemeral stages and the lessons they represent. — Cat Stevens

What I'm trying to do now in my life - not just with the building, but with everything - is to construct things that will have enduring qualities, and won't just be ephemeral flashes in the pan. — Sylvester Stallone

That feeling in your heart: it's called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon. — Ken Liu

All is ephemeral, Oliver, all of it. And it's your job now to make it last forever. — Shawn Mihalik

Life is eternal and, at the same time, ephemeral. — Debasish Mridha

In the deep dark silence, my mind dances with the moonlight and feels the joy of this precious ephemeral life. — Debasish Mridha

I will not speak of him as if he were absent, he has not been and he will never be. These are not mere words of consolation. Only those of us who feel it truly and permanently in the depths of our souls can comprehend this. Physical life is ephemeral, it passes inexorably ... This truth should be taught to every human being
that the immortal values of the spirit are above physical life. What sense does life have without these values? What then is it to live? Those who understand this and generously sacrifice their physical life for the sake of good and justice
how can they die? God is the supreme idea of goodness and justice. — Fidel Castro

Life is a flow of changes - transient and ephemeral. — Debasish Mridha

Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss. — Remy De Gourmont

But it is not emancipation that the great majority seeks. When pressed, most men will admit that it takes but little to be happy. (Not that they practice this wisdom!) Man craves happiness here on earth, not fulfillment, not emancipation. Are they utterly deluded, then, in seeking happiness? No, happiness is desirable, but it is a by-product, the result of a way of life, not a goal which is forever beyond one's grasp. Happiness is achieved en route. And if it be ephemeral, as most men believe, it can also give way, not to anxiety of despair, but to a joyousness which is serene and lasting. To make happiness the goal is to kill it in advance. If one must have a goal, which is questionable, why not self-realization? The unique and healing quality in this attitude toward life is that in the process goal and seeker become one. — Henry Miller

The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day. — Carl Sagan

Feminism wasn't supposed to make us miserable. It was supposed to make us free; to give women the power to shape their fortunes and work for a more just world. Today, women have choices that their grandmothers could not have imagined. The challenge lies in recognizing that having choices carries the responsibility to make them wisely, striving not for perfection or the ephemeral all, but for lives and loves that matter. — Debora Spar

Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life. — Allan Bloom

Quantum field theory arose out of our need to describe the ephemeral nature of life. — Anthony Zee