Quotes about transience

How fast passes away the glory of this world.

If only, dear friend, these precious treasures, beautiful and priceless as they are, were not so fragile too.

Good times don't last forever, all flowers fade.

No species remains constant: that great renovator of matter

Nature, endlessly fashions new forms from old: there’s nothing

in the whole universe that perishes, believe me; rather

it renews and varies its substance. What we describe as birth

is no more than incipient change from a prior state, while dying

is merely to quit it. Though the parts may be transported

hither and thither, the sum of all matter is constant.

Thus all things are but altered, nothing dies.

Now are fields of corn where Troy once stood.

But meanwhile it is flying, irretrievable time is flying.

In youth alone, unhappy mortals live;

But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive:

Discolored sickness, anxious labor, come,

And age, and death's inexorable doom.

I'm sorry for people who make a great to-do about the transitory nature of things and get lost in meditations of earthly nothingness. Surely we are here precisely so as to turn what passes into something that endures; but this is possible only if you can appreciate both.

The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

“In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.”

We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.