Quote by Andreas Gryphius: “All is vanity. Nothing is real but the moment.”

Everything that seems permanent — wealth, fame, power — will dissolve. The only thing that has any substance is the present moment you are actually living in. This is Gryphius pulling from Ecclesiastes and wartime devastation to arrive at a kind of dark mindfulness.

Gryphius wrote during the final decade of the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Central Europe between 1618 and 1648 and killed perhaps a third of the German-speaking population. His poetry is saturated with the experience of mass death and the collapse of stable civilisation.

German Baroque poet and playwright whose work was shaped by the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. His sonnets are among the finest in the German language, combining intense religious feeling with a preoccupation with transience, death, and the futility of earthly ambition.