For although memories, of a season, for example, Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure... That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting; It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal, Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt, Harsh strokes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or ...unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the thro...ng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.... For autobiography has to do with time, with seque...nce and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form--it may be called fleeting or eternal--is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulge...nce. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the ex...altation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is this world of ours? A complex entity subject to sudden changes which all indicate a tendency to destruction; a swift succe...ssion of beings which follow one another, assert themselves and disappear; a fleeting symmetry; a momentary order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that ...valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wo...nt to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »