Transitory Existence Quotes & Sayings

Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. — Arthur Balfour

Your Abnegation is showing, — Veronica Roth

I choose not to fight against but to stand for. Not to go against but to go for. — O. Stephen Peart

Learn to accept the transitory nature of existence of the body and the mind; see eternity in everything, this world, the other worlds, and nirvana. — Frederick Lenz

Tracy and I were among the few girls left in our class who hadn't made it to the table as Todd's girl of the moment. I'd never had the desire to be part of their demented version of Noah's Ark, where you could only survive if you were paired up with a member of the opposite sex. If I had to choose between dating Todd and missing the boat, I was fully prepared to drown. — Elizabeth Eulberg

My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive. — Charlotte Bronte

Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain. — Christian Wiman

Plato ... teaches the separation of the human soul from its " home " in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas . — Paul Tillich

And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it's efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing , one may dispose of it as he pleases. — Simone De Beauvoir

Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; & as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation. Thus, the constructive activities of man tale a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom; & reciprocally, one sees that such a movement is concrete: discoveries, inventions, industries, culture, painting, & books people the world concretely & open possibilities to men. — Simone De Beauvoir

For the demise of the Latin monarch, he who will reign with help and support will burn a brilliant fire. The Republic's booty divided and its bold dream disappeared. — Nostradamus

The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love. — Erich Fromm

A fault is fostered by concealment. — Virgil

We examine everything in existence and we come to see that everything is transitory and temporal, that which is left over is God, is eternity, is the Self. — Frederick Lenz

You sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. 'Father' is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. — J.I. Packer

He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood; it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else. — W. Somerset Maugham

Sometimes people can't see past us to hear our message. We never have a second chance to leave a first impression. — Charles R. Swindoll

The transitoriness of our existence in now way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities. — Viktor E. Frankl

He jerks. 'Ava. I love you so f**king much, but if you don't undo these cuffs, I'm going to f**king strangle you!' His voice is a mixture of pleasure and pain. — Jodi Ellen Malpas

It's really easy to do sad; you just put on some sad music and write dramatically - everybody can do that. — Jill Soloway

I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing. — Isabel Allende

Certainly we're not satisfied with just winning games. We've been playing some pretty good hockey, but we think we can play much better. — Mario Lemieux

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never wholly new ... — Edmund Burke