Quotes about Ephemerality

Soon you'll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice, truth—"gone from the earth and only found in heaven." Why are you still here? Sensory objects are shifting and unstable; our senses dim and easily deceived

Every true spiritual experience means that we have discovered a certain fact in Christ and have entered into that. Anything that is not from Him in this way is an experience that is going to evaporate very soon.

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.

You, indeed, have made my days as handbreadths, and my lifetime as nothing before You. Truly each man at his best exists as but a breath. Selah

He never returns to his house; his place remembers him no more.

My days are like lengthening shadows, and I wither away like grass.

You return man to dust, saying, “Return, O sons of mortals.”

Time is the subtle thief of youth.

You whisk them away in their sleep; they are like the new grass of the morning—

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

For my days vanish like smoke, and my bones burn like glowing embers.