Ephemeral Quotes - Page 6

Heaven has not learned of my arrival, and my departure will not in the least diminish it beauty and grandeur. I will sleep underground, for us ephemeral mortals, the only eternity is the moment and drinking to the moment is better than weeping for it.

Omar Khayyam

Drinking, Sleep, Heaven

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I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

Joyce Carol Oates

Strong, Art, Believe

Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.1, Zondervan

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Business and scholarship pass away with the person, but the soul is forever like new. Fame and fortune change with the generations, but the spirit is always the same. Enlightened people surely should not exchange the lasting for the ephemeral.

Zicheng Hong

People, Forever, Soul

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I really like the interplay between thinking of text as ephemeral and thinking of it as a concrete, physical thing. With almost anything that I write, I'll stay completely immersed in the electronic text of it for a period of time and in another period, I'll stay immersed in it as a physical thing that can cut your skin. So with the apocalypses, I had them taped all over the wall and they had codes on them. Sometimes I would color code them in terms of thematic elements, sometimes in terms of voice, sometimes visual forms or images.

Lucy Corin

Wall, Writing, Cutting

Source: therumpus.net

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As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.

Sally Mann

Children, Rivers, Childhood

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Celebrities were quick to understand that paparazzi could make icons of them. The more a star is followed and admired, the greater the adulation. So they raised the stakes, sometimes hiding when they don't even need to. Today, stardom is more ephemeral and it's photography that gives them their celebrity status.

Ron Galella

Photography, Stars, Icons

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[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.

Geoffrey Batchen

Communication, Mean, Snapshots

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As Bartok put it so succinctly: "Competitions are for horses." Nothing could be more barbaric that the practice or ranking artists as though they were divers or figure skaters....What one suspects is that the appetite for dividing the world into winners and losers, anointed and anonymous, is so compulsive that it feeds with special, vindictive hunger on the most elusive and ephemeral of subjects. For if music can be reduced to games of power and success, then innocence-love without profit-can be dealt a crushing blow.

Russell Sherman

Crush, Horse, Artist

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Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

Ann Leckie

Mean, Choices, Wish

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I'm very blessed, mainly because even though my family is mostly in show business, it's really centered around music. My parents were very successful in many ways, but they weren't necessarily top of the charts. We were never wealthy because of music. We always had to work and we always had to struggle a little bit, and I think at the end of the day that's been very good for me, because I have a sense of it being very ephemeral.

Rufus Wainwright

Struggle, Blessed, Successful

"If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainwright". Interview with Jacob Blickenstaff, www.motherjones.com. June 25, 2016.

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I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It's gratifying, but it's almost like doing radio. It's ephemeral.

Dan Savage

Radio, Bricks, Dropping

Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. February 8, 2006.

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The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.

Stephen King

Fiction, Literature, Bigs

Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

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When one is that powerful and one think life will last like that forever, it is simply the most ephemeral thing. I don't think these sons and daughters of drug dealers are contributing to a lasting peace nor to human values that add to our society. They're delivering the message of riches and power that comes at the cost of people's lives and health and they incentivize young people to follow this model.

Juan Pablo Escobar

Daughter, Powerful, Son

Source: harvardpolitics.com

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Romance is an illusion. Well, romance is not a complete illusion, but it's ephemeral. It does not last.

Bette Midler

Romance, Doe, Lasts

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Parents don't get that, though. They don't understand about the fragility of teen friendships. They don't understand how easy it is for things to break apart, how someone you thought would be by your side forever can just disappear, or turn on you, or decide she likes someone more than she likes you. Parents always talk about romantic relationships being so ephemeral and fleeting in high school. What they don't get is that friendships can be the same way.

Lauren Barnholdt

School, Your Side, Parent

Lauren Barnholdt (2013). “The Thing About the Truth”, p.89, Simon and Schuster

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Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.

Vikram Seth

Past, Thinking, Important

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Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

Twyla Tharp

Inspirational, Dance, Gone

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But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Memories, Struggle, Ambition

"The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald".

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Your heart will be shattered by sorrow If you force it to live In tomorrow's ephemeral imagination-world Instead of in today's eternal Reality-Now.

Sri Chinmoy

Heart, Reality, Imagination

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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

A. S. Byatt

Wisdom, Community, Fruit

FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Dec 17, 2011

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It occured to her that pleasure, no matter how deep, was a ghostly, ephemeral thing. Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it ws the cries of the badly wounded andf deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of it's axis.

Stephen King

Glasses, Axes, World

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I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.

Roland Barthes

Sorrow, Unhappy, Desire

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You have such interesting thoughts. No wonder witches are ephemeral. You drive yourself crazy. You should simply do what you want without the soul-searching. It will be easier in the long run, Rachel Mariana Morgan.

Kim Harrison

Running, Crazy, Long

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It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

W. Somerset Maugham

Pain, Men, Mind

W. Somerset Maugham (2010). “Cakes And Ale”, p.131, Random House

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In spite of what moralists say, the, animals are scarcely less wicked or less unhappy than we are ourselves. The arrogance of the strong, the servility of the weak, low rapacity, ephemeral pleasure purchased by great effort, death preceded by long suffering, all belong to the animals as they do to men.

Georges Cuvier

Death, Strong, Science

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