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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The lie is that our circumstances will always loom larger than any solution to those circumstances, and therefore our situation is (and will always be) our forever story. But God says that our circumstances will never be anything other than a fleeting footnote because He is our forever story.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I don’t know that time is fleeting. Rather, I think that it’s our wise use of it that’s fleeting.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Leave not the stars to chase after fireflies.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain

“In an hour I'll have strayed from what I am at this moment; tomorrow I'll have forgotten what I am today.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Deception may offer a fleeting throne,
but truth alone builds a kingdom of your own.”
― Srinivas Mishra

“When she first crossed the dry and dusty world which his mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

“Love in war is an act of defiance. A fragile thing, born in blood and fire, clinging to moments stolen between battles. It is not the love of quiet homes and safe futures; it is reckless desperate, and fleeting. It is whispered apologies in the dark. It is hands gripping too tight, bodies moving too fast, lips crashing together because tomorrow is never promised. It is what exists when nothing else can.”
― Dustin Lee

“Love in war is an act of defiance. A fragile thing, born in blood and fire, clinging to moments stolen between battles. It is not the love of quiet homes and safe futures; it is reckless desperate, and fleeting. It is whispered apologies in the dark. It is hands gripping too tight, bodies moving too fast, lips crashing together because tomorrow is never promised. It is what exists when nothing else can.”
― Dustin Lee, West of Nowhere

“.....Instead, hold your memories lightly, like delicate glass that can catch light but would shatter if gripped too tight. They will always be part of you, but they do not define all of you. They remind you that life is both fleeting and richly textured”
― Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"

“Joy is brief because eternity makes it cheap”
― Abyssino

“The slip was writhing.
I reached in to rescue it, even as the brown paper charred and the letters written on it turned to shadows. I thought I might hold it like an oak leaf, faded and winter-crisp, but when I wrapped my fingers around the word, it shattered.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words