Transience Quotes - Page 2

• The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Fall, Blow, Wind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.124

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• Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Expression, Ideas, Political

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

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• Cheat me not with time,
  with the dull ache of flesh,
  for all flesh turns,
  even the loveliest
  ankle and frail thigh,
  to bitterest dust.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Time, Dust, Ankles

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.287, New Directions Publishing

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• Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
  For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
  Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
  Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
  And Usna's children died.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Dream, Children

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.28, Wordsworth Editions

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• If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.

  Alan Watts

  Pain, Ghost, Forgotten

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.29, Souvenir Press

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• The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.

  Henry Giroux

  Generations, Way, Youth

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an
  end

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Long, Enough, Ends

  Algernon Charles Swinburne (2015). “Selected Verse”, p.410, Carcanet

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• In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.

  Azar Nafisi

  Art, Betrayal, Lying

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• Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he's something innately superior, something eternal--and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Self, Live In The Moment, Life Is

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• Nothing mortal is enduring, and there is nothing sweet which does not presently end in bitterness.

  Petrarch

  Sweet, Doe, Bitterness

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• With movement, families get split. With the politicization of religion, spirituality gets diluted. With people intermarrying and falling in love outside of pre-existing defined groups, the tribe is disappearing. I'm not in favor of going back to those things, but you can't take those things away without putting something new in its place. So finding a way to make transience more acceptable, even beautiful is key.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Beautiful, Falling In Love, Keys

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

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• Never mind the transience of show business and popularity. When we hear Ray Charles, we go, 'That's a great singer.' You don't need a reporter or a writer to tell us. Good is good and it should shine through the years.

  Art Garfunkel

  Years, Shining, Mind

  "Art Garfunkel: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. December 21, 2011.

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• This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Reality, Technique

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Stories, Paradise, Exploration

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• Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.

  Andy Goldsworthy

  Art, Weather, Keys

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• It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

  Arundhati Roy

  Children, Commitment, Eye

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• Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

  Baldur von Schirach

  Symphony, Youth, Faust

  "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership". Book by Joachim C. Fest , p. 221, 1999.

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• yet it seems
  Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
  Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
  But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
  And there's but common greenness after that.

  William Butler Yeats

  Life, Morning, Garden

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.207, Simon and Schuster

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• Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."

  Martha Ronk

  Play, Leaving, Gone

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Everything here below beneath the sun is subject to continual change; and perhaps there is nothing which can be called more inconstant than opinion, which turns round in an everlasting circle like the wheel of fortune. He who reaps praise today is overwhelmed with biting censure tomorrow; today we trample under foot the man who tomorrow will be raised far above us.

  E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Men, Circles, Feet

  E. T. A. Hoffmann (2012). “The Best Tales of Hoffmann”, p.365, Courier Corporation

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• And learn that the best thing is
  To change my loves while dancing
  And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

  William Butler Yeats

  Kissing, Dancing, Pay

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.112, Wordsworth Editions

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• Buddhist nirvana ... is based on egolessness and is not anthropocentric but rather cosmological. In Buddhism, humans and the things of the universe are equally subject to change, equally subject to transitoriness or transmigration. A person cannot achieve emancipation from the cycle of birth and death until he or she can eliminate a more universal problem: the transience common to all things in the universe.

  Masao Abe

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Common

  Masao Abe (2016). “Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue: Part one of a two-volume sequel to Zen and Western Thought”, p.80, Springer

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• I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly.

  Peter Heller

  Real, Thinking, Knowing

  Peter Heller (2012). “The Dog Stars”, p.216, Vintage

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