Ephemeral Quotes - Page 5

• Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Spring, Past, Delight

  H. P. Lovecraft (1999). “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories”, p.16, Penguin

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• Flowers are fragile and ephemeral...Even if you meant to protect them with a surrounding fence from wind and rain, they would die without sunlight...and a spindly fence has no power against a strong wind. - Haibara Ai

  Gosho Aoyama

  Strong, Rain, Flower

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• Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death. ...Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.

  Muriel Barbery

  Mean, Track, Dying

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• Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.

  Eudora Welty

  Art, Memories, Writing

  Eudora Welty (2002). “On Writing”, Random House Digital, Inc.

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• Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Art, Momentum, Fleeting

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• Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months! It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Fashion, Art

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• I guess because theater's so ephemeral and it's gone. You make this nightly contract with the audience and you redraw that contract for the next night, whereas film and television, it's forever. I suppose it's always about adopting personas, never about being yourself. I think they call it a "shy man's revenge."

  Cillian Murphy

  Being Yourself, Revenge, Night

  "The Shy Man’s Revenge". Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 17, 2014.

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• Ask yourselves this question: How often is Jesus inside and knocking at the door to be let out, to come out? And we do not let him out because of our own need for security, because so often we are locked into ephemeral structures that serve solely to make us slaves and not free children of God.

  Pope Francis

  Jesus, Children, Doors

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• The English language lacks the words 'to mourn an absence.' For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful, some not. Still, we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only 'I am sorry for your loss.' But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent, ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?

  Laura Bush

  Baby, Children, Sorry

  Laura Bush (2010). “Spoken from the Heart”, p.105, Simon and Schuster

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• When I think of someone equating poems and machines, it makes me feel like that person would like poems to have a more obvious use value in society. They're not happy with poetry being this ephemeral, indefinable thing. They want it to be "real."

  Elaine Equi

  Real, Thinking, Machines

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Memories, Evening, Glamour

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.805, e-artnow

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• As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

  David Byrne

  Cylinders, Music Is, Discs

  David Byrne (2017). “How Music Works”, p.141, Three Rivers Press

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• The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Ideas, Definitions, Language

  FaceBook post by Maxine Hong Kingston from Jun 30, 2010

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• Those who have been too long at their labor, who have drunk too long
  at the cup of voluptuousness, who feel they have become temporarily
  inhumane, who are tormented by their families, who find life sad and
  love ephemeral......they should all eat chocolate and they will be
  comforted.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Long, Drunk, Chocolate

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• Only by the supernatural is a man strong--only by confiding in the divinity which stirs within us. Nothing is so weak as an egotist--nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Strong, Men, Divinity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Jean Ferguson Carr (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, addresses, and lectures”, p.241, Harvard University Press

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• Time and fevers burn away
  Individual beauty from
  Thoughtful children, and the grave
  Proves the child ephemeral

  W. H. Auden

  Death, Children, Thoughtful

  'Another Time' (1940) no. 18, p. 43

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• but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art-the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few

  Laird Barron

  Art, Mean, Eye

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• Al-Qaeda's obituary has been written countless times over the decade. Each iteration has proved to be ephemeral, as the moment has continually shown itself to have a deeper bench than we imagine.

  Bruce Hoffman

  Benches, Als, Moments

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• I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you.

  Billie Jean King

  Sports, History, Goes On

  FaceBook post by Billie Jean King from Jun 01, 2010

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• I like things you can touch and things you can keep, because every bit of communication we have is ephemeral in nature. You can just delete an e-mail and it's like it was never there.

  Taylor Swift

  Communication, Mail, Bits

  "Why Taylor Swift Welcomed You to New York". Interview with Scott Raab, www.esquire.com. October 20, 2014.

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• I dont make resolutions, because resolutions seem so ephemeral and transient to go away.

  Ian K. Smith

  Going Away, Resolution, Seems

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• The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

  Rosanne Cash

  Painting, Sand, Monk

  Rosanne Cash (2010). “Composed: A Memoir”, p.133, Penguin

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• Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.

  Aristotle

  Children, Race, Would Be

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• On the whole, mental archaeology was a sordid digging proposition. The evil men did endured, the good was infinitely more ephemeral. You could generally find out whether a man had been a horse-thief, or an embezzler or a wife-beater, if you worked hard enough, but acts of kindness, of charity, a gay spirit, vanished without leaving a trace.

  Helen Kieran Reilly

  Horse, Kindness, Gay

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• Sometimes, when I play music, I feel as if I am giving life. ... It isn't just notes on the paper anymore: you are recreating the thought, transmitting it. It becomes shareable, but it can never be kept. You go through and at the same time you let go of the experience. That is part of the wonder of music: it can never be kept; it is ephemeral and at the same time enduring.

  Hephzibah Menuhin

  Music, Letting Go, Play

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