Short Lived Quotes - Page 5

• The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Happiness, Hard Work, Wind

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• Nothing is more short-lived than pride.

  Ben Jonson

  Pride

  Ben Jonson (1756). “The Works of Ben. Jonson: Underwoods. Timber; or, Discoveries made upon men and matter. Horace, Of the art of poetry [with an English translation by Jonson]. The English grammar. Leges convivales, rules for the Tavern Academy. The case is altered”, p.118

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• Transiency is stamped on all our possessions, occupations, and delights. We have the hunger for eternity in our souls, the thought of eternity in our hearts, the destination for eternity written on our inmost being, and the need to ally ourselves with eternity proclaimed by the most short-lived trifles of time. Either these things will be the blessing or the curse of our lives. Which do yon mean that they shall be for you?

  Alexander MacLaren

  Heart, Mean, Blessing

  Alexander Maclaren (1908). “The Book of Esther”

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• A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Ocean, School, Night

  Gretel Ehrlich (1995). “A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning”, p.67, Penguin

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• Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination.

  Taner Edis

  Average, Sea, Imagination

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• Pity, though it may often relieve, is but, at best, a short-lived passion, and seldom affords distress more than transitory assistance; with some it scarce lasts from the first impulse till the hand can be put into the pocket.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Passion, Hands, May

  Oliver Goldsmith (1824). “Essays, poems and plays”, p.33

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• For the short-lived bloom and contracted span of brief and wretched life is fast fleeting away! While we are drinking and calling for garlands, ointments, and women, old age steals swiftly on with noiseless step.

  Juvenal

  Drinking, Age, Fleeting

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• I knew Kathy Joosten; we worked together on a very short-lived series called Thanks for CBS.

  Kirsten Nelson

  Together, Thanks, Series

  "'Psych's' Kirsten Nelson reminices about 'The West Wing' and the late Kathryn Joosten". Interview with Andrea Reiher, screenertv.com. February 24, 2014.

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