Fleeting Moment Quotes & Sayings

Further, the constitution of our consciousness is the ever present and lasting element in all we do or suffer; our individuality is persistently at work, more or less, at every moment of our life: all other influences are temporal, incidental, fleeting, and subject to every kind of chance and change. This is why Aristotle says: It is not wealth but character that lasts.
And just for the same reason we can more easily bear a misfortune which comes to us entirely from without, than one which we have drawn upon ourselves; for fortune may always change, but not character. Therefore, subjective blessings - a noble nature, a capable head, a joyful temperament, bright spirits, a well-constituted, perfectly sound physique, in a word, mens sana in corpore sano, are the first and most important elements in happiness; so that we should be more intent on promoting and preserving such qualities than on the possession of external wealth and external honor. — Arthur Schopenhauer

For a fleeting moment, I imagine that if I were queen, I could make the act of hurting malfettos a crime. I could execute this boy's pursuers with a single command. — Marie Lu

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

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form - it may be called fleeting or eternal - is in neither case the stuff that life is made of. — Walter Benjamin

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one
which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*. — Dag Hammarskjold

You always look on the dark side of life. I believe in capturing the moment ... Joy is so fleeting. You never know when it might be snatched away. — Susan Wiggs

Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now! — Ruth Ozeki

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment. We don't have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life isn't always going to go our way. It means there's loss as well as gain. — Pema Chodron

O, worldly pomp, how despicable you are when one considers that you are empty and fleeting ! You are justly compared to watery bubbles, one moment all swollen up, then suddenly reduced to nothing. — Ordericus Vitalis

Despite that, for a fleeting moment I have the urge to ask if Dean Thomas is still in Gryffindor, or if he's gone over to Hufflepuff, where I'd always believed he belonged. But my father wouldn't get the joke, and in this case, Dean isn't a first name. — Mimi Cross

Few - very few - are entirely bereft of at least one solace-giving memory: a childhood prayer answered, a testimony borne long ago, a fleeting moment of perfect peace. And for those few who despairingly insist they have never heard so much as a whisper, then know this: We don't need to look for a burning bush when all we need is to be still and remember that we have known the goodness of love, the rightness of virtue, the nobility of kindness and faithfulness. And as we remember, we can ask if we perceive in such beauties merely the random effects of Darwinian products, or the handwriting of God on our hearts. — Terryl L. Givens

What makes human life
which is inseparable from this moment
so precious is its fleeting nature. And not that it doesn't last but that it never returns again. — Steve Hagen

There's a fleeting moment that exists for every individual just before they do something truly life-altering. Its that flash of insight and sanity that stalls your heartbeat and bloo flow - a quick warning - just before you explode and make a fool of yourself. Or that incredible brief instant of clarity you have before you floor the gas pedal and run the red light. It's a split second of self admonishment in which you realise that what you're about to do is wrong, but just as quickly choose to ignore that realisation and do it anyway. It's too fast to catch, too bright to see, utterly gone even before you've blinked and therefore, it does a person absolutely no good at all. And yet, there it is. — Heather Killough-Walden

You have no idea
How much you do for mankind
When you love God unconditionally
Even for a fleeting moment. — Sri Chinmoy

She dug into one of the boxes, finding clay angels she'd made in art class when she was seven years old. She found plastic swans on strings and red crystal cardinals. She found a blue-and-white rocking horse covered in glitter. She found a porcelain Santa Claus. She found that she couldn't figure out where the hell time had gone. — Rebecca McNutt

love means nothing. It's an invisible, fleeting moment. Somewhere between false adoration and pure hatred comes an emotion, a vulnerable need, a single desire. It lives within the ones who miss it, who crave it, who know better than to expect it. Love is relentless, even when the love turns to hate, turns to loathing, turns to death. ~ — Jay McLean

Don't wait. The time will never be just right. Life is short and fleeting and yet we are always all waiting for the 'right moment' to do something. When I have more money. Or when I quit my job. Or when I've lost weight. There always seems to be an excuse for not doing the things you want to do. Stop waiting for the right time and just start. The best time is now. — Oprah Carnegie

We can either choose to cling to starring roles in the little-bitty stories of us or opt to exchange our fleeting moment in the spotlight for a supporting role in the eternally beautiful epic that is the Story of God. I — Louie Giglio

There are no words in that fleeting moment between hope and the knowledge. There is no way to express how a heart can burst and break at the same time, how the sun can cut through the darkness but will case shadows everywhere. — Marieke Nijkamp

All things in life are fleeting so live in the moment — Sonya Watson

Travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you're forced to look for meaning within yourself Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you 'find yourself', it's because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind - it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true self. — Rolf Potts

A picture is a fleeting moment of life preserved on a canvas. — Debasish Mridha

One day, you muster the courage and let go of the fear. In a brief moment of insanity, you give wings to the stories you had wanted to tell; some you didn't even know were in you. In that instant, something about you changes. You are born again.

That is not to say the fear and worry and second-guessing go away. They are there. But you learn to cope with them. You learn that they don't control you at all times. In those fleeting moments of freedom, you have the power. You know you are not perfect. You realize no one was born perfect. No one. Rome wasn't built in a day either.
A weird thing happens when you get a glimpse of that side of you. A child-like zeal possesses you. It is addictive. You discover your voice. You matter. Maybe not to the world, yet. You matter to yourself. You are worthy. You are alive. You can be. — K.J. Kilton

And for just a fleeting moment, a tiny wisp of time that hung in the air like fireflies
in summer skies, she wondered if she was in love with him again. — Nicholas Sparks

Because we demand a future, we live each moment in expectation and unfulfillment. We live each moment in passing. In just this way the real nunc stans, the timeless present, is reduced to the nunc fluens, the fleeting present, the passing present of a mere one or two seconds. We expect each moment to pass on to a future moment, for in this fashion we pretend to avoid death by always rushing toward an imagined future. We want to meet ourselves in the future. We don't want just now - we want another now, and another, and another, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And thus, paradoxically, our impoverished present is fleeting precisely because we demand that it end! We want it to end so that it can thereby pass on to yet another moment, a future moment, which will in turn live only to pass. — Ken Wilber

Sometimes you only have a fleeting moment in time to grasp an opportunity, as fate may never again line up a set of circumstances in the same way. — C.E. Graham

Summer romances begin for all kinds of reasons, but when all is said and done, they have one thing in common. They're shooting stars, a spectacular moment of light in the heavens, fleeting glimpse of eternity, and in a flash they're gone — Red

The point is to savor and treasure every moment, every breath. They are precious because they are limited. Nothing in abundance is ever held dear. It's cast off without any thought whatsoever. But happiness, victory, and life are sacred because they are fleeting and stingily measured. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Up to
now man derived his coherence from his Creator. But from the moment that he consecrates his rupture
with Him, he finds himself delivered over to the fleeting moment, to the passing days, and to wasted
sensibility. — Albert Camus

Life is so great that we only get a tiny moment to enjoy everything we see. And that moment is right now. And that moment is counting down. And that moment is always, always fleeting. You will never be as young as you are right now. — Neil Pasricha

One clear moment, one of trance
One missed step, one perfect dance
One missed shot, one and only chance
Life is all...but one fleeting glance. — Sanober Khan

Dying is so simple. A fleeting moment of suffering. In the blink of an eye you are over the threshold, into another world. No more pain, no more fears. You sleep so well there.
Dying is like rubbing snow together, setting fire to a whole winter of cold and ice. — Shan Sa

None of this matters a bit. Yet, of course, it matters at that moment. So we try to be mindful of the moment; but it's fleeting. — Frederick Lenz

He had seen the vision of perfect heroism and, for a fleeting moment, the vision of perfect peace. He sought it again, to balance him. He was a warrior who longed to grow herbs. — Jeanette Winterson

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily. — Andre Breton

Live every day as if the Son of Man were at the door, and gear your thinking to the fleeting moment. Just how can it be redeemed? Walk as if the next step would carry you across the threshold of Heaven. Pray. That saint who advances on his knees never retreats. — Jim Elliot

What happens when we lose the things that anchor us? What if, instead of grasping at something to hold on to, we pull up our roots and walk away? Instead of trying to find the way back, we walk deeper and deeper into the woods, willing ourselves to get lost. In this place where nothing is recognizable. not the people or the language or the food, we are truly on our own. Eventually, we find ourselves unencumbered by the past or the future. Here is a fleeting glimpse of our truest self, our self in the present moment. — Rachel Friedman

A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a s fragile as a bird's heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. — Kate Atkinson

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Your love reaches every living being, including animals, because they deserve love. Your love spreads to plants, mountain ranges, galaxies, as all part of one ever-changing, fluid energy.

This doesn't happen every second of every day. In fact, it happens in fleeting moments, and then you return to your self-centered concerns. But for that fleeting moment, you are the World's Greatest Lover.

So what? Who cares about a title like that? The title doesn't matter, but being able to love like that changes you. — Anonymous

But for each person who is made happy by love, there will be many for whom it turns out to be a cause of regret. That is because it can be so fleeting; one moment it may take our breath away, the next it may leave us bereft. When it does that, love can be like a haunting, staying with us for year after year; we know that it is gone, but somehow we persuade ourselves that it is still there ... Nobody would choose to be in love like that, to hold on so strongly to something that was no longer there. — Alexander McCall Smith

Most of life is hell. It's filed with failure and loss. People disappoint you. Dreams don't work out. Hearts get broken. Innocent journalists die. And the best moments of life, when everything comes together, are few and fleeting. But you'll never get to the next great moment if you don't keep going. So that's what I do. I keep going. — Sigourney Weaver

A heartfelt smile. And even if...it's just for a moment...my pain...my fears...my sorrows - let them all...sleep now. For this moment...just for this fleeting moment- — Hotaru Odagiri

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.
To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. — Walter Pater

That happens in life, where a brief, fleeting moment can change us forever, and as hard as we try, it cannot be re-created. And just as hard as it is to recreate, it is harder yet to let it go. — Kunal Nayyar

My tattoo is of a cannon in Vancouver that I got in a fleeting moment of stupidity maybe 14 years ago. A lot of people have really beautiful tattoos, and I get real tattoo envy. But then other people basically just treat them like bumper stickers for their bodies. — Ryan Reynolds

For a fleeting moment, Adam could imagine it: the brocade curtains in decaying flames, the decorated consorts screaming from beneath the harpsichord, Ronan standing among it all saying Fuck Washington. — Maggie Stiefvater

Connoisseurs of Russian beauty could have foretold with certainty that this fresh, still youthful beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty, would "spread"; that the face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very soon appear upon her forehead and round the eyes; the complexion would grow coarse and red perhaps - in fact, that it was the beauty of the moment, the fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. — Ella Leya

He was back at the point of departure, at the place that filled writers with dread and excitement, for this was where they must decide which new story to tackle of the many floating in the air, which plot to bind themselves to for a lengthy period; and they had to choose carefully, study each option calmly ... because there were dangerous stories, stories that resisted being inhabited, and stories that pulled you apart while you were writing them ... At that moment, before reverently committing the first word to paper, he could write anything he wanted, and this fired his blood with a powerful sense of freedom, as wonderful as it was fleeting, for he knew it would vanish the moment he chose one story and sacrificed all the others. — Felix J. Palma

The difference between poets and mystics ... The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting. — Neal Stephenson

Reynie's fce fell. 'It's not funny, Kate.'
For a moment - a fleeting moment - Kate looked desperately sad. 'Well, of course it's not funny, Reynie Muldoon. But what do you want me to do? Cry? — Trenton Lee Stewart

In every corridor Parwana would see men's eyes snapping to attention when Masooma passed by. She saw their efforts to behave matter-of-factly, but their gazes lingered, helpless to tear away. If Masooma glanced in their direction, they looked idiotically privileged. They imagined they had shared a moment with her. She interrupted conversations midsentence, smokers mid-drag. She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups. Some days it was all too much for Masooma, as if she was almost ashamed, and she told Parwana she wanted to stay inside all day, wanted not to be looked at. On those days, Parwana thought it was as though, somewhere deep inside, her sister understood dimly that her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head. Most days, however, the attention seemed to please her. Most days, she relished her power to derail a man's thoughts with a single fleeting but strategic smile, to make tongues falter over words. — Khaled Hosseini

For me and my family personally, September 11 was a reminder that life is fleeting, impermanent, and uncertain. Therefore, we must make use of every moment and nurture it with affection, tenderness, beauty, creativity, and laughter. — Deepak Chopra

She walks barefoot into the humid night, moonlight on her freckled shoulders. Near a huge, live oak tree on the edge of her father's cotton fields, Sidda looks up into the sky. In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.
Sidda stands in the moonlight and lets the Blessed Mother love every hair on her six-year-old head. Tenderness flows down from the moon and up from the earth. For one fleeting, luminous moment, Sidda Walker knows there has never been a time when she has not been loved. — Rebecca Wells

The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and listening and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve it or deserve anything yet it is here and I am here and I Have it all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment or this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving. — James Frey

[O]nce in a while there's that fleeting moment when the kindest thing you can do for another is to utter a severe word or a sharp observation that may hurt momentarily; — Steve Hagen

A man who becomes enchanted by the flower's fragrance stays only for a fleeting moment, but a man who comes because of love stays for a lifetime. — Kim Dong Hwa

She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realizing the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savor the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next - that was life. — Rose Macaulay

The body comes and goes. This life, my friend, will come and go. It is a fleeting moment, an impulse in an eternal reality. — Frederick Lenz

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do
out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation
look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing. — Werner Herzog

The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred — Allen Ginsberg

Coffee is a fleeting moment and a fragrance. — Claudia Roden

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
— Merce Cunningham

For me, it's always a failure of the imagination. I have that anxiety that time is passing, that everything is ultimately fleeting and impermanent. I better take advantage of every single moment. — Jason Silva

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it. — Margaret George

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection. — W. Somerset Maugham

It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were determined not to be united by anything else. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

For a split second they stared at each other. A fleeting, lasting moment. One person noticing another person out of a whole crowd of strangers. — Alexandra Potter

Francis Crawford's face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the waterbrook, and does not know, until it sees the pool under the trees, for what it has thirsted. — Dorothy Dunnett

On the plane leaving Tokyo I'm sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing "Over the Rainbow" straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don't even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon. — Bret Easton Ellis

There is nothing wrong with dedication and goals, but if you focus on yourself, all the lights fade away and you become a fleeting moment in life. — Pete Maravich

Catching the right fleeting moment, with the right focus, is a very difficult thing to do. — Ren Ng

everything changes. Snow becomes water. It's beautiful because it changes. Things are fleeting. It felt so beautiful to be part of this weird world in that moment. I felt part of the world again, rather than removed from it. It — Timothy Ferriss

The ambition of 'Ten Thousand Saints,' Eleanor Henderson's debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus. — Stacey D'Erasmo

My time with Eli was a sweet sort of agony. It was like the feeling you would get watching a bubble as a child. A thing you can't help but find magical and beautiful yet it must remain elusive. You can't try to get too close. You can't try to touch it lest it pop and be gone forever, but there is nothing you want more than to try. So frustrated you will yourself to hold back and savor it for what it is, a moment of fleeting perfection. — Jennifer Mardoll

She'd said that revenge was not sweet, that it was bloody. She was wrong. It *was* sweet. For one fleeting, glorious moment you felt incredible satisfaction. Then it was gone, empty, and you had to go on living. The power high that filled me with her light had faded, and all I tasted now were bitter ashes. — Sunny

The lifespan of human beings is merely a small blip in time. We are temporary visitors on this planet and we should embrace every moment that we are alive. Life is delicate, beautiful and fleeting, make the most of it and never take it for granted. Thank you for reading and be prepared for anything my friends! — Frank Montgomery

It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved - turned this way and that, examined, considered. — Ahdaf Soueif

Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness. — Tom Robbins

It's a moment that I'm after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment. — Andrew Wyeth

It's what we're all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer day. Sitting on the curb and watching the streetlights come on. Playing in the sprinklers with a group of neighbor kids. We're all trying to salvage a time when we dreamed beyond our reality and thought monsters were under our beds instead of peppering our family trees. We're trying to harness those fleeting moments that turned our ordinary lives into something extraordinary. In the sepia haze of those memories, we are beautiful. — Liza Palmer

My friend, let's not think of tomorrow, but let's enjoy this fleeting moment of life. — Omar Khayyam

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day's newspaper. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries. — Richard M. Nixon

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by. — Rosamunde Pilcher

O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment
let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Joy is as thorny and sharp as any of the dark emotions. To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn't come with guarantees - these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. — Brene Brown

When we feel for certain that we are alive, then we know for certain that we shall go on living. Those who have never put life to the test,
in all possible ways, these keep on crying out:
Life is fleeting, Life is waning, Life is like a dew-drop on a lotus leaf.

But, isn't life inconstant?

Only because its movement is unceasing. The moment you stop this movement, that moment you begin to play the drama of Death. — Rabindranath Tagore

On a motorcycle, I learned to let go of the vast uncertainty and focus instead on what is in front of me: the surface of the road and the curve of it, the vehicles in front and behind, the wind and the rain and the wildlife peeking out of the grass. There are times when I struggle to manage every last detail as it whips pat me, to hold on to past and present and future simultaneously, but they're not mine to understand, or control. I have to remind myself, again and again, that only this is mine: this moment, this heartbeat, this decision. — Lily Brooks-Dalton

There is a gust of eternity in every fleeting moment. — Marty Rubin

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

From the moment of birth, every human being wants to discover happiness and avoid suffering. No differences in our culture or our education or our religion affect this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire joy and contentment. But so often these feelings are fleeting and hard to find, like a butterfly that lands on us and then flutters away. "The — Dalai Lama XIV

Their lives would not turn out as they dreamed. I understood this, even as mine had turned out far better than I would have hoped, had I permitted myself to hope for anything at all. I was the exception, I knew, and even my own good fortune I believed to be a fleeting moment in what would be a long, hard, solitary life. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

A beautiful blossom is a fleeting thing It stays for a moment and then takes wing: With special rays we catch it ere flight So all may enjoy the beautiful sight. — Albert Richards

He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by. On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate's face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other's skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath. — Victoria Schwab

From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting. — Alex Ebert

Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive. — Angela Carter

And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzling over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own. — Hermann Hesse

She was as lovely as ever, my Jessie Anne. I paused for a moment, taking her beauty in, laying up this vision of her in the deepest and most secret place of my mind, allowing the sight of her to renew my spirit. I stepped slowly down to the platform, never allowing my gaze to drift from her. Jessie Anne was looking toward the front of the car, and it was a moment or two before she turned and spotted me.
The bright and hopeful smile I had so expected and longed for darkened, just for a moment to be sure, but long enough for me to recognize a fleeting glimpse of shock and anguish, possibly of horror. No longer did she see the man she had known, the man she had given her life to. No, she saw me for the man I truly was, the man with blood on his hands. — Karl A. Bacon