The Ephemeral Quotes

As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image. ~ Craig Owens

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I really believe we in the music industry can work together to find a way to bond technology with integrity and just really hope we can teach the younger generation the value of investment in music rather than the ephemeral consumption of it. ~ Taylor Swift

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo
It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered. ~ Alice Walker

Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat
especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

He took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love. ~ Milan Kundera

Marvelously clear-fretted in the unsmoked air, the Abbey rose, silver-grey. It stood detached by the serenity of age from the ephemeral growths around it. It was solid on a foundation of centuries, destined, perhaps, for centuries yet to preserve within it the monuments to those whose work was now all destroyed. I did not loiter there. In years to come I expect some will go o look at the old Abbey with romantic melancholy. But romance of that kind is an alloy of tragedy with retrospect. I was too close. ~ John Wyndham

As C. S. Lewis pointed out, it is not that our desires are too strong (as Stoicism would have it), but that they are too weak. 3 The irony of our lives is that we demand the ephemeral, momentary glories of this fading age, too easily amused and seduced by the trivial, when ultimate joy is held out to us. ~ Michael S. Horton

By means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. Only two or three primitive passions had governed me until this time: fear, the struggle to conquer fear, and the yearning for freedom. But now two new passions were kindled inside me: beauty and the thirst for learning. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament. ~ Aspen Matis

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value. ~ Eugene Ionesco

Everything is conceptual, designed and created by man to differentiate between the eternal and the ephemeral. ~ Gian Kumar

I'll destroy the ephemeral. ~ Diego

I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it ... forever. Or at least I'm going to try.' ~ Jason Silva

It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium. ~ Hans Arp

The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant. ~ Rosanne Cash

And you're sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes
you're sorry, for you didn't even have time to fall in love ... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I look at my parents
the way mothers look at their toddlers.
I take every chance
to witness them undisturbed.
To study every detail
as if sitting for an important exam.
I take note of their hands,
the curves of their ears, the way they
envelop a room and greet others.
The way their souls shine through
when they speak of something they love,
like a candid photograph
unveiling beauty and truth.
Even though I am present
in the same space as them,
I am distanced
because of the intensity of my love.
Every heartbeat reminds me
of the ephemeral nature of our bodies
and the blessedness of these moments
until my father looks up from his book
and catches me smiling.
And like a child he is bewildered for a moment
and smiles back. ~ Kamand Kojouri

As I get older it gets harder and harder to hold on to the ephemeral excitement. When a documentary, or a screenplay, or even just a brainstorming session is going well I get to experience sense of hope, and expansiveness, even if it's just for a moment. ~ Andrew Neel

A shooting star yields very little light. ~ Marty Rubin

We are not grand because we are at the top of the food chain or because we can alter our environment - the environment will outlast us with its unfathomable forces and unyielding powers. But rather than be bound and defeated by our insignificance, we are bold because we exercise our will anyway, despite the ephemeral and delicate presence we have in this desert, on this planet, in this universe. ~ Aron Ralston

our situation reminded me of a fable I had read somewhere. Chased by a tiger, a man slips and falls over the edge of a mountain. As he falls, he manages to grab a bush growing by the side of the mountain and hangs on to it for dear life. The bush is laden with wild strawberries that hang tantalizingly near his mouth. As the tiger snarls above his head and a gorge stretches beneath his dangling feet, the man takes a bite from a luscious berry. 'How sweet,' he exclaims as he relishes its taste.

I do not remember the moral attached to the fable. It might have been a commentary on the ephemeral nature of life, on how foolish it is to imagine that there is happiness to be found in the world when death is certain and likely to happen at any time. Or it might have been an exhortation to seize the day and squeeze the most out of every moment, for, in any case, we are
all going to die. It might have made a reasonably good ad for strawberries, which were so good that you simply had to eat them, even if it was the last thing you did. ~ Indu Muralidharan

On the one hand, our minds try to probe the ephemeral reality of the quantum world; on the other, we talk, think, and act in a language adapted for discussing trees, rocks, and automobiles
as well as poetry and emotions. ~ F. David Peat

A magical portal opened inside my mind and conducted me into an astonishing world ... Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of Cretan, but of every man ... that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about. ~ Jane Smiley

Why hold off the inevitable? Why, for the ephemeral. ~ Heidi Heilig

Beyond the ephemeral and the dark stands "a sign from eternity, solemn and mighty, bathed in the radiance of the divine sun of grace and light - the cross. And there [God] hangs, his arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire world in love."42 ~ Charles Marsh

Software is a tangle, a knot, which ties together the physical and the ephemeral, the material and the ethereal, into a multi-linear ensemble that can be controlled and directed. ~ Dr David M. Berry

The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a spec of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo

It is true that widely accepted ideas are never the personal property of their so-called author; on the contrary, he is the bond-servant of his ideas. Although they come into being at a definite time, they are and have always been timeless; they arise from that realm of procreative, psychic life out of which the ephemeral mind of the single human being grows like a plant that blossoms, bears fruit and seed, and then withers and dies. Ideas spring from a source that is not contained within one man's personal life. We do not create them; they create us. ~ C.G. Jung

Now let us look to the ancient inhabitants of India. With them, first of all, religion was not only one interest by the side of many. It was the all-absorbing interest; it embraced not only worship and prayer, but what we call philosophy, morality, law, and government, - all was pervaded by religion. Their whole life was to them a religion - everything else was, as it were, a mere concession made to the ephemeral requirements of this life. ~ Friedrich Max Muller

He rowed them past the last of the stars. He rowed them clear of the night's embrace. He rowed them straight into and beyond the break of day. And somewhere along that stretch of river, he also rowed them across an invisible fault line, a seam on the American continent that separates the terrain where the ephemeral events of everyday reality unfold from a more rarefied and singular realm, the place where mythic and permanent journeys of the imagination, such as those of John Wesley Powell, reside - the place of legends. ~ Kevin Fedarko

Quantum field theory arose out of our need to describe the ephemeral nature of life. ~ Anthony Zee

My advice to whoever asks me how to make a home is to not have anything, just a few shelves for books, some pillows to sit on. And then, to take a stand against the ephemeral, against passing trends ... and to return to lasting values. ~ Gae Aulenti

Human life holds the glorious potential of granting us immortality if we use it to redirect our love from the ephemeral to the eternal. ~ Chaitanya Charan Das

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It's the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful. ~ Yoshida Kenko

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure. ~ Eudora Welty

The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death.
... Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?
Maybe that's what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying. ~ Muriel Barbery

Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers. ~ Sylvia Plath

Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible? ~ Julia Kristeva

Rebellion is born of the spectacle of
irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. But its blind impulse is to
demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral. It protests, it demands, it
insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands
should henceforth be founded on rock. Its preoccupation is to transform. But to transform is to act, and to
act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate. Rebellion engenders
exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its
reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere. It must consent to examine itself in order to
learn how to act. ~ Albert Camus

He could focus my attention on how perfectly sublime life can be at times. Such moments are ephemeral, and without his guidance I might have missed many of them, working so hard to get somewhere that I would fail to recognize when I had arrived. ~ Kevin Hearne

Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion. ~ Jean Cocteau

To conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus tomorrow will be a mummy or ashes. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Nothing is more vulnerable and ephemeral than scientific theories, which are mere tools and not everlasting truths. ~ C. G. Jung

Your heart will be shattered by sorrow if you force it to live in tomorrow's ephemeral imagination - world instead of in today's eternal reality - now. ~ Sri Chinmoy

I don't make resolutions, because resolutions seem so ephemeral and transient to go away. ~ Ian K. Smith

I don't like ephemeral things; I like things that last forever ~ Laura Ashley

Remind yourself often that self-esteem is ephemeral. You will have it, lose it, cultivate it, nurture it, and be forced to rebuild it over and over again. ~ Cherie Carter-Scott

All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Everything was ephemeral, yet everything was eternal, ~ Kate Atkinson

If only I can realize how ephemeral my life is, then I will never be able to hurt anyone. ~ Debasish Mridha

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

I like things you can touch and things you can keep, because every bit of communication we have is ephemeral in nature. You can just delete an e-mail and it's like it was never there. ~ Taylor Swift

Fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt ~ Jack Kerouac

For every tale carved in rock there are more inscribed on autumn leaves or woven into spiderwebs. ~ Erin Morgenstern

Yet I've discovered that how I look is not a function of anything as ephemeral as my hair. ~ Judith Light

I don't seek discomfort. But, very often, you realise that what you fear is actually quite ephemeral; something's different, something's unfamiliar; therefore, it must be worse. ~ Michael Palin

Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour. ~ Thomas Hardy

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

We are here but for a second, but our impact ripples through time. ~ Neetal Parekh

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Policies are ephemeral; principles are eternal. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Earthly possessions are transient and ephemeral. Giving away love creates ripples that last for some time. ~ Debasish Mridha

Freedom is strangely ephemeral. It is something like breathing; one only becomes acutely aware of its importance when one is choking. ~ William E. Simon

Life is like a snowflake - transient, translucent, adventurous, ephemeral, and beautiful. ~ Debasish Mridha

How fragile, how ephemeral in flight
This life -- for instance: butterfly, alight! ~ Kim Soin

Theater is so ephemeral, and I love that. ~ John Malkovich

And a moment that ought to have lasted for ever
Has come and gone before I knew. ~ Li Shang-yin

Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant. ~ John Le Carre

I think it's a very ephemeral thing, what makes a show a success. ~ Douglas Carter Beane

Life is transient and ephemeral so dance in your own way. ~ Debasish Mridha

These errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage. ~ Virginia Woolf

I've had so much of you in such little time that I shouldn't be suffering from withdrawal! ~ Ahmed Mostafa

Exhibitions are kind of ephemeral moments, sometimes magic moments, and when they're gone, they're gone. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

All is ephemeral, Oliver, all of it. And it's your job now to make it last forever. ~ Shawn Mihalik