Temporary State Quotes

Anger is a momentary madness.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, "And this too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage.

"No" is just a moment in time.

We're just a bubble in a boiling pot.

I wanted to stay this way forever. Which, it turns out, was exactly five more minutes.

Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

Nothing is forever...nothing lasts.

Hysteria takes too much energy to be maintained forever.

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.

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

On Being Old. It's not nice but take comfort that you won't stay that way for ever.

A dancer differeth from a madman only in length of time; one is mad so long as he liveth, the other while he danceth.

Imagine your body replaced by dust and vapor, and having a tingly feeling in your stomach without even having a stomach. Imagine having to concentrate just to keep yourself from dispersing into nothing. I got so angry, a flash of lightning crackled inside me. “Don’t be that way,” Amos chuckled. “It’s only for a few minutes.

I try to remind myself that all of this could be over tomorrow, because I could wake up and magically be 35 feet tall and not be able to act in movies anymore.

Five days or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last longer.

This can't last. This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.

We are here for what amounts to a few/hours,/a day at most./We feel around making sense of the terrain,/our own new limbs,/Bumping up against a herd of bodies/until one becomes home./Moments sweep past. The grass bends/then learns again to stand.

It's just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere new. That's how life works.

My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.

Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states.

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