Transitory Quotes

• All things are only transitory.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Literature, All Things

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• Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Art, Elements, Half

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• I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.

  Patrick Stewart

  Sentimental, Canvas, Absurd

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• When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Love, Birthday, Marriage

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• Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day.

  Ramakrishna

  Attachment, Names, Comfort

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• Our pleasance here is all vain glory,
  This false warld is but transitory.

  William Dunbar

  World, Glory, Vain

  "The Life and Poems of William Dunbar".

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• A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

  Jean Giraudoux

  Golf, Space, House

  Jean Giraudoux (1964). “Collected Plays of Jean Giradoux”

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• For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Men, Lasts, Faces

  The Great Gatsby ch. 9 (1925)

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• Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.

  William Law

  Christian, Religious, Time

  William Law (1740). “An earnest and serious answer to Dr. Trapp's Discourse of the folly, sin, and danger of being righteous over-much. An appeal to all that doubt, or disbelieve the truths of the Gospels”, p.110

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• Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

  Franz Liszt

  Art, Light, Serenity

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• Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Wind, Literature, Wave

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• Our abode in this world is transitory, our life therein is but a loan, our breaths are numbered and our indolence is manifest.

  Abu Bakr

  World, Loan, Indolence

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• From a Christian point of view of course we do want a peaceful world, and I think September 11 did actually make people aware not only of vulnerability and how transitory life is, but there are forces of good and honor and justice which speak to us of God and his love for us.

  George Carey

  Christian, Thinking, Views

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• Everything transitory is but an image.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• The unbroken realization that you are indivisible from the universe, from universal consciousness, from the source of everything - that you are that source, that there is no other, no second, nothing that is not part of that unity, except as transitory illusion. If you could maintain that realization at all times, through waking and sleeping states of consciousness, across the threshold of death itself, what would you be?

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Death, Sleep, Unity

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• Within the human consciousness is the unique ability to perceive the transparency between absolute, permanent relationships, contained in the insubstantial forms of a geometric order, and the transitory, changing forms of our actual world. The content of our experience results from an immaterial, abstract, geometric architecture which is composed of harmonic waves of energy, nodes of relationality, melodic forms springing forth from the eternal realm of geometric proportion.

  Robert Lawlor

  Unique, Order, World

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• The happiness of the world is transitory. The less you become attached to the world, the more you enjoy peace of mind.

  Sarada Devi

  Mind, World, Enjoy

  Sarada Devi (1984). “The Gospel of the Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi”

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• Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Life, Adventure, Marvelous

  Nikki Giovanni (1983). “Those who ride the night winds”, William Morrow & Co

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• Above the titles of wife and mother, which, although dear, are transitory and accidental, there is the title human being, which precedes and out-ranks every other.

  Mary Livermore

  Mother, Wife, Titles

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• The Economic Problem...the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Struggle, Class, Want

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• Christianity is not engrossed by this transitory world, but measures all things by the thought of eternity.

  John Gresham Machen

  World, Christianity, Eternity

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• The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Beautiful, Butterfly, Joy

  Cynthia Ozick (1991). “The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories”, E P Dutton

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• I don't see myself as having made the transition. I aim to be more transient than transitional. Life is constantly changing, now at a rate faster than ever, so being in a transitory state is the best way to keep pace.

  Marc Forster

  Transition, Pace, Way

  Source: www.askmen.com

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• I think I have some very meaningful relationships with people; we all do. At the same time, I recognize that everyone is following their own heart; there's been people who have left my life, and I don't have a problem with that. This is a transitory world; we're all spirits just looking for love and finding it and holding on.

  Cass McCombs

  Meaningful, Heart, Thinking

  "Cass McCombs’ Good Humor". Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 7, 2011.

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• Man is a transitory being, and his designs must partake of the imperfections their author.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Design, Imperfection

  Alexander Pope, William Lisle Bowles, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Chalmers, Gilbert Wakefield (1806). “The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. in Verse and Prose: Containing the Principal Notes of Drs. Warburton and Warton: Illustrations, and Critical and Explanatory Remarks, by Johnson, Wakefield, A. Chalmers ... and Others; to which are Added, Now First Published, Some Original Letters, with Additional Observations, and Memoirs of the Life of the Author”, p.16

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