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

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them;

And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again.

Come tutte le cose rapidamente svaniscano, nel cosmo i corpi stessi, nel tempo il loro ricordo;

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

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are—all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To

Second, that both the longest-lived and the earliest to die suffer the same loss. It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if indeed this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Remember: Matter: how tiny your share of it. Time: how brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate: how small a role you play in it.

By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone. . . But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on