Quotes about Transience

The voice said, Cry. And he said, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.

Our days on the earth are as a shadow.

Riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven.

Sweet little flower of heavenly birth You were too fair to bloom on earth.

What is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

The fashion of this world passeth away.

For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again.

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

How gloomy would be these mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he shall never die; that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on for ever. Those that lie here stretched before us, the wise and the powerful of ancient times, warn us to remember the shortness of our present state; they were, perhaps, snatched away while they were busy, like us, in the choice of life.

[Philosophers] are like a traveler passing through a field at night who in a momentary lightning flash sees far and wide, but the sight vanishes so swiftly that he is plunged again into the darkness of night before he can take even a step-let alone be directed on the way by its help.

We see how mankind, without well thinking what they are doing, pursue, with impetuous and   ardent affections, the transitory things of this world; but, in thus catching at the empty shadow of a happy life, they lose true happiness itself.

Yesternight the sun went hence,And yet is here today.