Life Is 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

We stand on the edge of the abyss, across whose unknowable face we paint meaning so as not to see into it. It is always there. But we're here too, and we are no less real than the abyss. We are no less meaningful for being transient creatures caught up in something too big for us. There is still value to our lives. I've learned that those things that are most fragile are also the most precious. — Ovadya Ben Malka

Happy? That doesn't feel solid enough, somehow. Like it's fleeting or transient, and whenever something crappy happens, it's gone in a puff of smoke. I'm in love with someone I want to spend my life getting to know. He makes me feel safe and trusted and strong and beautiful, and all the things that give me validation that who I am is someone worth knowing. I guess it feels more bliss than happiness. — April White

Thoughtful for Winter's future sorrow,
Its gloom and scarcity;
Prescient to-day, of want to-morrow,
Toiled quiet Memory.
'Tis she that from each transient pleasure
Extracts a lasting good;
'Tis she that finds, in summer, treasure
To serve for winter's food.
And when Youth's summer day is vanished,
And Age brings Winter's stress,
Her stores, with hoarded sweets replenished,
Life's evening hours will bless. — Charlotte Bronte

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

I believe we are all transient," she began. She thought for awhile and added, "I believe that we are half-blind and full of errors. I believe that we understand very little, and what we do understand is mostly wrong. I believe that life cannot be survived - that is evident! - but if one is lucky, life can be endured for quite a long while. If one is both lucky and stubborn, life can sometimes even be enjoyed. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Life is nothing but a transient dream dancing at the tip of a leaf called time. — Debasish Mridha

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

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

Life is so transient, finite, and fragile that there is no time to hate anyone. — Debasish Mridha

Life is a transient phenomenon with eternal reflection. — Debasish Mridha

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

Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor. — Rosi Braidotti

Love is the language of life and all others are transient epi-phenomena. Like a fish, we are swimming in the ocean of love. We are so busy seeking love that we don't realize we are swimming in love. — Debasish Mridha

Defeat is a transient perception but giving up is permanent. So never give up. — Debasish Mridha

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

Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I think it is wrong to expect certainties in this world, where all else but God that is Truth is an uncertainty. All that appears and happens about and around us is uncertain, transient. But there is a Supreme Being hidden therein as a Certainty, and one would be blessed if one could catch a glimpse of that Certainty and hitch one's waggon to it. The quest for that Truth is the summum bonum of life. — Mahatma Gandhi

Events are transient, feelings are momentary, perception is optional and internalization is life long. — Debasish Mridha

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

Loss taught me about the frailty and transient nature of man. It taught me humility. It taught me about the urgency of service, of touching lives, of mentoring, of legacy. Of making hay while there is still sunshine and life. — Nana Awere Damoah

Life is so great in its opportunities and possibilities, that you should rise confidently above the inevitable trifles incident to daily contact with the world. Life is too precious to be sacrificed for the nonessential and transient ... Ignore the inconsequential. — Grenville Kleiser

Eternal life" is not - as the modern reader might immediately assume - life after death, in contrast to this present life, which is transient and not eternal. "Eternal life" is life itself, real life, which can also be lived in the present age and is no longer challenged by physical death. This is the point: to seize "life" here and now, real life that can no longer be destroyed by anything or anyone. This — Pope Benedict XVI

Life even at its tiniest molecule is impermanent, transient, unsure and fickle. We try to make it worthwhile not by adding value to it but by improving our social perception, seeking validation in our interactional circles. Life cannot be valued for in the end, rich or poor, smart or dumb, popular or hermit, we are nothing but dust, vapor, blurry memories that eventually are soon forgotten. — Crystal Evans

Failure is transient but giving up is permanent. — Debasish Mridha

The world you experience, every day and night of your life, is transient. They only last for the blink of an eye, and then they dissolve back into that unknowable and formless eternity. — Frederick Lenz

Trying to use the power of yoga to improve your life, this is a terrible mistake. Because all you are doing is binding yourself more. You're putting more of your attention into the transient world. — Frederick Lenz

All things are transient. Buddha says it is so, and Hock Seng, who didn't believe in or care about karma or the truths of the dharma when he was young, has come in his old age to understand his grandmother's religion and its painful truths. Suffering is his lot. Attachment is the source of his suffering. And yet he cannot stop himself from saving and preparing and striving to preserve himself in this life which has turned out so poorly.
How is it that I sinned to earn this bitter fate? Saw my clan whittled by red machetes? Saw my businesses burned and my clipper ships sunk? He closes his eyes, forcing memories away. Regret is suffering. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Autobiography is the most fascinating thing you can do because you get to touch the human condition. And in the end, what else is there? To me, it's the ultimate affirmation of life, and a miracle of this transient, extremely fragile organism. To celebrate that, I think, is a noble thing to do. — Jim Dine

Life is a transient phenomenon but not a permanent destination. — Debasish Mridha

If there is any intelligence guiding this universe, philosophy wishes to know and understand it and reverently work with it; if there is none, philosophy wishes to know that also, and face it without fear. If the stars are but transient coagulations of haphazard nebulae, if life is a colloidal accident, impersonally permanent and individually fleeting, if man is only a compound of chemicals, destined to disintegrate and utterly disappear, if the creative ecstasy of art, and the gentle wisdom of the sage, and the willing martyrdom of saints are but bright incidents in the protoplasmic pullulation of the earth, and death is the answer to every problem and the destiny of every soul
then philosophy will face that too, and try to find within that narrowed circle some significance and nobility for man. — Will Durant

but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. Saeed — Mohsin Hamid

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Look about and contemplate life! 1 Everything is transient and nothing endures. There is birth and death, growth and decay; there is combination and separation. 2 The glory of the world is like a flower: it stands in full bloom in the morning and fades in the heat of the day. 3 Wherever you look, there is a rushing and a struggling, and an eager pursuit of pleasure. There is a panic flight from pain and death, and hot are the flames of burning desires. The world is vanity fair, full of changes and transformations. — Paul Carus

Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of. — Kenny Smith

Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus it may be looked on as weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent relieves we receive from it and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life. — Malcolm De Chazal

To regard such a positive mental science [psychology] as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature, is therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life. — Robin G. Collingwood

The life, when we're aware of beauty, is kind of a bittersweet thing, it's a transient reminder of eternal beauty, which someday we will be face to face with. — Jon Foreman

Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes. Spend, therefore, these fleeting moments of earth as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth. — Marcus Aurelius

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

I think actresses are imagined to be these subjects of great vanity. Life is change; physicality changes. It's transient, and that's a beautiful and a painful thing. — Uma Thurman

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

None has more frequent conversations with a disagreeable self than the man of pleasure; his enthusiasms are but few and transient; his appetites, like angry creditors, are continually making fruitless demands for what he is unable to pay; and the greater his former pleasures, the more strong his regret, the more impatient his expectations. A life of pleasure is, therefore, the most unpleasing life. — James Goldsmith

Life is transient but memory is eternal. — Debasish Mridha

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

Life is so short, transient, and beautiful that there is not enough time to get old. — Debasish Mridha

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient. — Duane Michals

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows
in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain
in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine
it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction. — George Eliot

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

When you make people angry, they act in accordance with their baser instincts, often violently and irrationally. When you inspire people, they act in accordance with their higher instincts, sensibly and rationally. Also, anger is transient, whereas inspiration sometimes has a life-long effect. — Peace Pilgrim

the only thing that lasts a whole lifetime is life itself, everything else is inevitably precarious, unstable, transient — Jose Saramago

Life is a wildly transient thing with people coming into your life and dropping away. It definitely takes work to maintain relationships. — Natasha Lyonne

For what Luc was in fact proposing was just a game, an enticing game, but, even so, one that could destroy my undoubtedly quite genuine feelings for Bertrand; and it could destroy something else within me, something ill-defined but fiercely felt, which, whether I liked it or not, was opposed to transience. Or, at the very least, to the intentionally transient nature of what Luc what was offering. And then, even if I was able to conceive of any passion or liaison as being short-lived, I couldn't accept in advance that it had to be that way. Like any individual for whom life is a series of charades, I could bear the charades only if they were written by me, and by me alone. — Francoise Sagan

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

Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things ... My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide — F Scott Fitzgerald

The entire life of the personal ego is continually in the grip of wanting, i. e., an attempt to seek fulfilment of desires through things that change and vanish. But there can be no real fulfilment through the transient things — Meher Baba

Fear and failure are always present. Accept them as part of life and learn how to manage these realities. Be scared, but keep going. Being scared is usually transient. It will pass. If you fail, fix the causes and keep going. — Colin Powell

Life in illusion is in a transient belief on insight without perspective — Farley Maglaya

Art is long, life is short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. — Henry David Thoreau

It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live "the impossible", taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying with the characters of the illusion, a life that is richer, more intense, or more abject and violent, or simply different from the one that they are confined to by the high-security prison that is real life. Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Outbox and its inherent transient nature - is it a take on life itself ? momentary, independent, fleeting and somewhat meaningless dwelling for all creations on their way out - to sent items. — Sunil Raina

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class - in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding - but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. — Mohsin Hamid

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