Fleeting Quotes

“in a world
full of
temporary things

you are
a perpetual
feeling.”
― Sanober Khan

“For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Life is made up of a collection of moments that are not ours to keep. The pain we encounter throughout our days spent on this earth comes from the illusion that some moments can be held onto. Clinging to people and experiences that were never ours in the first place is what causes us to miss out on the beauty of the miracle that is the now. All of this is yours, yet none of it is. How could it be? Look around you. Everything is fleeting.

To love and let go, love and let go, love and let go...it's the single most important thing we can learn in this lifetime.”
― Rachel Brathen

“Happiness is an undercurrent of sensitivity and leads a surreptitious life: it is an internal eventuality. We can feel it in stillness and it stands the test of time. Joy is an eruption of cheerful moments and we want to express it: it is an external eventuality. We might shout it out, as it conveys a dynamic of fleeting instants. Joy gives voice to “en-joy-ment”. ("The grass was greener over there")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let us not remain anchored in the quicksand of a waning past, and lose the war on obliviousness, but let us listen to the bracing sounds of new horizons, grasp the enchantment of the fleeting instants and seize the cleverness of the moment. (Could time be patient?)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“As we walk through life, fleeting emotional episodes may keep on twinkling, curl up in the hive of our recollection and enrich our imagination. In the same vein, esthetic allurement and poetic gracefulness may possess us, besiege our mind, light up our thinking and shape our future. ( Über alle Gipfeln ist Ruh”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“For it is up to you and me
to take solace
in nostalgia's arms

and our ability
to create
the everlasting
from fleeting moments.”
― Sanober Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest

“One clear moment, one of trance
One missed step, one perfect dance
One missed shot, one and only chance
Life is all...but one fleeting glance.”
― Sanober Khan

“The magic fades too fast
the scent of summer never lasts
the nights turn hollow and vast
but nothing remains...nothing lasts.”
― Sanober Khan

“If today is not your day,
then be happy
for this day shall never return.
And if today is your day,
then be happy now
for this day shall never return.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“...beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“All things, including us, are fleeting and ever-changing. Our life journey is an ongoing process of exploration and transformation. Therefore, life's meaning must be constructed in the face of death's absurdity. ("Living on probation" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“But even in his dissatisfaction he could not quiet the feeling that time was like a flash flood, so full, so brimming with things that must be done at once, but running out all the same, leaving an emptiness, a dry ditch in its wake.”
― Bess Tefft, Merrie Maple

“Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”
― Clarice Lispector

“There are a lot of fleeting moments in life, and it’s always those small encounters that touch the fucking core. It changes you in subtle yet apparent ways. There was before them, but after them will come with a fight to forget that little moment that change your entire life.”
― Nikki Rowe

“But illness does not always write itself upon the body, the sickness I search for is hidden deep within the brain. Sometimes it rises to the surface. Sometimes the face betrays what the body conceals. But there moments, these betrayals, last no longer than an instant. They come, they go, they pass over the patient, darkening and brightening his face like clouds gusting over a meadow. How is it possible, then, to tell what he is suffering when the visible signs of his inner disorder appear so fleetingly upon his face?”
― Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Madeleine Is Sleeping

“Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“Time is a fleeting thing, a precious gift of life's days, It comes and goes, a bird with swift wings. How I wish I could have more time, but time is fleeting, like a passing breeze, it moves fast and cannot be grasped, it's there one day, gone the next. Of this precious gift I give you mine because you are worth every second spent.”
― Rolf van der Wind

“How often he had felt that living life is nothing more than writing on the surface of the lake! So fleeting! Ephemeral! Although each day when it arrives seems like the day that has just passed, it does hold well the power to bring something new or to take away someone dear.”
― Mukta Singh-Zocchi, The Thugs & a Courtesan

“Evanescent grace, you vanish as a vapor
does, or love in open air.”
― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Heaven

“Nothing stays long enough to know.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“An apology is a simple thing. A few easy words which we hope will correct for our regrettable actions. If accepted, however, an apology is of little worth. It indicates a momentary change of heart. Though not always a lasting one.”
― Steven T. Seagle, Warblade: Especies en Peligro

“You change your way of thinking drastically when you become aware of how fleeting life can be.”
― Carlos Wallace

“The present moment, though fleeting, is the only tangible moment.
The rest are but a heap of memories.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“It was here long before me, and I always assumed it would exist long after. Perhaps that’s what hurt the most; realizing the fleeting nature of even the most monolithic of objects.”
― Mackenzie Finklea, Beyond the Halls: An Insider's Guide to Loving Museums

“I made other promises too, the kind of promises the living make to the dying when we have the sudden realization that we are all- in fact the dying. That life is fleeting capable of bending the other way at any moment. We reach hard for life.”
― Tembi Locke

“Can one instant of ecstasy redeem a life of despair? Maybe only an artist could live that kind of life. Can beauty exist in heaven where nothing ever changes, where nothing dies or grows old, where there’s no cycle of death and rebirth, no seasons of growth and decay? How can there be beauty when everything is beautiful? Maybe beauty, true beauty, exists only when it’s perishable, already containing the seeds of ugliness.”
― Mike Hockney, The Armageddon Conspiracy

“The human in the long run is always momentary.”
― Byron Rizzo, Polypticon, Part I: The Joint Political-Informatic Effort Project

“This Being chose to rip me from a fleeting and insignificant life in which I was decaying into dust, and give me life eternal, making me an object more immortal, more imperishable than the rocks themselves.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“But she was in love, head over heels in love the way you are at age six, without knowing that this love would be as fleeting as it was
powerful, and as powerful as it was secret, and misunderstood, an attachment, an obsession that Oceane had never called, nor would ever call `love'.”
― Grégoire Courtois, The Laws of the Skies