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Quotes about Transience

In the morning consider that you may not live till evening, and when evening comes do not dare to promise yourself the dawn.
— Thomas a Kempis
Life is so, so short. Bible says it's like a vapor.
— Muhammad Ali
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
— Marcus Aurelius
What is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.
— Anonymous
Women on trains have a life that is exactly livable the precision of days flashing past
— Audre Lorde
The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
— Margaret Atwood
If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.
— Madeleine L'Engle
Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.
— William Faulkner
She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.
— Milan Kundera
Let nothing disturb you nothing frighten you all things are passing God never changes.
— Teresa of Avila
“Show me, O LORD, my end and the measure of my days. Let me know how fleeting my life is.
— Psalm 39:4
Man is a transitory being, and his designs must partake of the imperfections their author.
— Samuel Johnson