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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

  Hermann Hesse

  Flower, Fall, Heart

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Narcissus and Goldmund: A Novel”, p.157, Macmillan

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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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• Everything transitory is but an image.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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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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• Selfless giving reminds us that there is an eternally present spirit in all of us, that when revealed, liberates us from both the transitory and the eternal - both of which ultimatly can be attachments.

  Frederick Lenz

  Karma, Yoga, Selfless Giving

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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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• Youth -- nothing else worth having in the world...and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability -- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.

  Richard Halliburton

  Beautiful, Indulge In, Wish

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• The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Desire, Usual

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• You can reach timelessness if you look for the essence of things and not the appearance. The appearance is transitory — the appearance is fashion, the appearance is trendiness — but the essence is timeless.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Fashion, Essence, Looks

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• Human progress planned as alternatives (to God's plan) introduce in justice, evil and violence rising against the divine plan of justice and salvation. And despite transitory and apparent successes, they are reduced to simple machinations destined to dissolution and failure.

  Pope John Paul II

  Faith, Inspiration, Simple

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• All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Justice, Doe

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