Transitory Quotes

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

I'm not always really calm, but I try not to get taken away by things that are incredibly transitory.

[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.

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

At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.

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.

Everything transitory is but an image.

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

The transitory interests of royal houses may be advanced in war; the real interests of all people are furthered by the peace.

The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure.

Human beings affix themselves to things that are of little or no importance. They affix themselves to the transitory, to things that are impermanent, and in doing so, they get all upset

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

She loved with so much passion as she loved with ignorance. She did not know whether it were good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary or accidental, eternal or transitory, permitted or prohibited: she loved.

Plato ... teaches the separation of the human soul from its " home " in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas .

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.

A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.

When there exists anywhere a state of suffering, a wrong, a condition of affairs that men of feeling deplore and that troubles the conscience of the upright, to become resigned to it is wicked. Although the evil flaunts itself before our eyes, and no remedy is in sight, we must go and seek a remedy. In the creation of the God of Justice, evil can be but a transitory state.

Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

The sequoias belong to the silences of the milleniums. Many of them have seen a hundred human generations rise, give off their little clamors and perish. They seem indeed to be forms of immortality standing here amoing the transitory shapes of time.

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

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.

Today's youth have been cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

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.

Regard as free not those whose status makes them outwardly free, but those who are free in their character and conduct. For we should not call men truly free when they are wicked and dissolute, since they are slaves to worldly passions. Freedom and happiness of soul consist in genuine purity and detachment from transitory things.

[The designated or chosen leader tries to] articulate and justify the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action.

I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

Action is transitory, a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle, this way or that, 'Tis done--And in the after-vacancy, We wonder at ourselves, like men betrayed.

The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.

Man is a transitory being, and his designs must partake of the imperfections of their author. To confer duration is not always in our power. We must snatch the present moment, and employ it well, without too much solicitude for the future, and content ourselves with reflecting that our part is performed. He that waits for an opportunity to do much at once, may breathe out his life in idle wishes, and regret, in the last hour, his useless intentions and barren zeal.

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.

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

Odors can be highly transitory, depending on the air currents. If this is happening in your house, ask if there are any possessions of that deceased loved one still around. If it happens elsewhere, consider just how many millions of people use the same perfume or smoke the same brand of cigar as someone you knew.

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.

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?

It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer

Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets.

Learn to accept the transitory nature of existence of the body and the mind; see eternity in everything, this world, the other worlds, and nirvana.

As you learn to accept that the body is transitory, as you watch it with love, but without attachment, the body will develop purity.

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.

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