76 Quotes About Transience

Forget the clock. It has no power over time.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

In the end, everyone is aware of this:nobody keeps any of what he has,and life is only a borrowing of bones.

Ah, Lalage! while life is ours, Hoard not thy beauty rose and white, But pluck the pretty fleeing flowers That deck our little path of light: For all too soon we twain shall tread The bitter pastures of the dead: Estranged, sad spectres of the night.

Zen is important as a counterbalance to the western eagerness and performance thinking. As long as one cannot concede more than 60-100 years of earthly existence with appropriate vitality, the relativism will dominate the continuum for all times and makes the rational-materialist thinking totally annihilated, because all the material and utopian values can´t be transferred into the other sphere.

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme."("The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes," she continued, "is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.")[Le beau Laurence]

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring - these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are worthier of our admiration.