Transitory Quotes - Page 4

• Clearly, the pleasures wines afford are transitory - but so are those of the ballet, or of a musical performance. Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Wine, Joy, Ballet

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• Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Determination, Men, Wind

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2006). “A Defence of Poetry: an Essay: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.44, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.

  Thomas Huxley

  Expression, Survival, Cosmos

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1997). “The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.286, University of Georgia Press

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• We are not only to renounce evil, but to manifest the truth. We tell people the world is vain; let our lives manifest that it is so. We tell them that our home is above and that all these things are transitory. Does our dwelling look like it? O to live consistent lives!

  Hudson Taylor

  Truth, Home, Dwelling

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• 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.

  Samuel Johnson

  Regret, Opportunity, Men

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”

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• Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory world, should never master us; we should guide them, guide them.

  Charles Dickens

  World, Affection, Guides

  Charles Dickens (1868). “The Works of Charles Dickens ...: The mystery of Edwin Drood and Master Humphrey's clock”, p.9

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• Our moods and insights are transitory. This current is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.

  Julia Cameron

  Moving, Destiny, Grace

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• Rash, angry words, and spoken out of season, When passion has usurp'd the throne of reason, Have ruin'd many. Passion is unjust, And for an idle, transitory gust Of gratified revenge, dooms us to pay With long repentance at a later day.

  Theognis of Megara

  Revenge, Anger, Passion

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

  Craig Owens

  Photography, Art, Desire

  Craig Owens, Scott Stewart Bryson (1994). “Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture”, p.56, Univ of California Press

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• Every design is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this transitory quality is captured, is reflected in the designs: the more precise they are, the more vulnerable.

  Alvaro Siza Vieira

  Design, Quality, Nuance

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• The things which we hold in our hands, which we see with our eyes, and which our avarice hugs, are transitory, they may be taken from us by ill luck or by violence; but a kindness lasts even after the loss of that by means of which it was bestowed; for it is a good deed, which no violence can undo.

  Seneca the Younger

  Kindness, Taken, Mean

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• Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Character, Lasting Change

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Pain and pleasure are transitory; endure all dualities with calmness, while trying at the same time to remove their hold. Imagination is the door through which disease as well as healing enters. Disbelieve in the reality of sickness even when you are ill [...].The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery.

  Sri Yukteswar Giri

  Pain, Philosophical, Healing

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

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Knowing, Today's Youth, Way

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• [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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Believe, Sacrifice, Self

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

  Herbert Spencer

  Feelings, Doe, Culture

  Herbert Spencer (1910). “Works”

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

  Edward Gibbon

  Greatness, Serious, Scene

  Edward Gibbon (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Edward Gibbon (Illustrated)”, p.1871, Delphi Classics

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• 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.

  Sigmund Freud

  Ideas, Consciousness, Moments

  Sigmund Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• Throughout much of our lives, our association with the temporary has risen. This transitory body, a sack of bones and flesh, is considered erroneously as our true body and we have accepted this temporary condition as conclusive.

  George Harrison

  Body, Flesh, Association

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• God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Heart, Wrath, Intuition

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• All transitory titles I detest; a virtuous life I mean to boast alone. Our birth's our sires'; our virtues be our own.

  Michael Drayton

  Mean, Titles, Birth

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• Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.

  Edmund Burke

  Wise, Men, Names

  Edmund Burke (1852). “The works and correspondence of...Edmund Burke”, p.267

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• Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Panacea

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2013). “Vindication of the Rights of Women”, p.28, Lulu.com

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• 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.

  Gustave Le Bon

  Independent, People, Atheism

  Gustave Le Bon (1947). “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”, p.57, Lulu.com

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