Transient Quotes - Page 7

• There's a path in enlightenment called the path of negation where we intentionally throw ourselves into experiences that are extremely transient. In other words, we do all the stuff you're supposed to normally avoid to become enlightened, intentionally.

  Frederick Lenz

  Philosophy, Enlightenment, Stuff

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• Reflect upon the defects of your character: thoroughly realize their evils and the transient pleasures they give you, and firmly will that you shall try your best not to yield to them the next time.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Character, Yield, Evil

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• Part of what we seek in Buddhism is the sense of quiet observation. We don't get so involved in a state of mind that we forget that it's just another transient state of mind, no matter how much ecstasy or agony is involved.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Agony, Mind

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• Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Men, Atheism, Type

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• If we have a giant mansion and we don't keep it as well as that room, then our yoga isn't good and our attention field will be very poor and we won't have power, and we'll be totally hooked on the transient .

  Frederick Lenz

  Yoga, Giants, Attention

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• Pain and suffering only occur in temporal time. They don't occur in the world of forever. They only occur in limited transient time, which is a state of mind.

  Frederick Lenz

  Pain, Forever, Mind

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• Heroism is no extempore work of transient impulse--a rocket rushing fretfully up to disturb the darkness by which, after a moment's insulting radiance, it is ruthlessly swallowed up,--but a steady fire, which darts forth tongues of flame. It is no sparkling epigram of action, but a luminous epic of character.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Character, Epic, Rushing

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• Mansions once
  Knew their own masters, and laborious hinds,
  That had surviv'd the father, serv'd the son.
  Now the legitimate and rightful lord
  Is but a transient guest, newly arrived,
  And soon to be supplanted. He that saw
  His patrimonial timber cast its leaf,
  Sells the last scantling, and transfers the price
  To some shrewd sharper ere it buds again. Estates are landscapes, gazed upon awhile,
  Then advertised and auctioneer'd away.

  William Cowper

  Father, Son, Bud

  William Cowper (1828). “The Poems of William Cowper”, p.227

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• God's truth is too sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its transient fit of earnestness.

  Frederick William Robertson

  God, Sacred, Fit

  Frederick William Robertson (1873). “Sermons Preached at Brighton”, p.230

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• When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.

  George Eliot

  Life, Clouds, Imagination

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.259

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• God does not refuse to make himself known to man. He only will not do it by the symbolism of matter. He comes to us at once by the most natural course. We are in a transient state; our bodies are accidental, and God comes to us by that which is higher and truer--the intuitions of the soul.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  God, Men, Symbolism

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.97

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• The soul, at peace, reflects the peace without, Forgetting grief as sunset skies forget The morning's transient shower.

  Emma Lazarus

  Morning, Peace, Grief

  Emma Lazarus (2015). “The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume I: Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic”, p.142, Courier Corporation

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• Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat - especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Emotional, Law, Space

  Letter to August Derleth (21 November 1930), in "Selected Letters III, 1929-1931" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 220), 1971.

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• True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Children, Museums

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

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• Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes).

  Ernst Mach

  Reality, Doe, Elements

  "The Analysis of Sensations". Book by Ernst Mach, 1897.

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• Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.

  Fred Hoyle

  Stars, Achievement, Century

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• Transient bodies are only subject to destruction through their substance and not through their form, nor can the essence of their form be destroyed; in this respect they are permanent.

  Maimonides

  Essence, Substance, Body

  Moses Maimonides (2016). “Guide for the perplexed”, p.1008, Moses Maimonides

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• Why do we resist giving help to homeless men? In part because we don't understand how our pressure on men to support families often forces men to take transient jobs that are but a step away from homelessness (the death-of-a-salesman jobs, the migrant worker jobs...) and in part because we respond differently to men who fail [than women who fail].

  Warren Farrell

  Jobs, Men, Giving

  Warren Farrell (1994). “The myth of male power: why men are the disposable sex”

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• Modernity is the most transient of qualities.

  Anthony Daniels

  Quality, Modernity

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• I have a very real political awareness that at least on a transient basis the more drastic action taken by the president, the more popular it is.

  Jimmy Carter

  Real, Taken, Political

  "Jimmy Carter Talking About Himself... His Record... His Campaign". Interview with Meg Greenfield, www.washingtonpost.com. March 29, 1980.

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• All you have to do is play better than the other guy and things go well. If you don't play better than the other players then somebody takes your place. Now a lot of guys, in this day and time with the transient nature of the sport, as soon as the competition gets too good, they want out.

  Bill Parcells

  Sports, Player, Guy

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• While it is all very well to distinguish happiness that is transient from that which is lasting, between ephemeral and genuine happiness, the only happiness it is meaningful to speak of when a person is dying from thirst is access to water.

  Dalai Lama

  Meaningful, Water, Dying

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• Swift flies our time on pinions fleet, Like vapours on the breeze; The transient bliss we now call sweet, The passing moments seize. The gilded joy, the present hour, Soon wing themselves away; Departing like the fading flower That pleas'd us Yesterday.

  William Muir

  Sweet, Flower, Wings

  William Muir (1818). “Poems on Various Subjects”, p.91

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• The samskaras that were developed in previous incarnations are usually hidden by the temporary amnesia of infancy and by the transient personality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Personality, Samskara, Infancy

  Frederick Lenz (1994). “Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap”, Interglobal Seminars

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• Behind the transient reality, there is something else. It is a deeper, more permanent and unchanging reality that we Buddhists call nirvana.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Reality, Unchanging

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