Quotes About Transience

It is the nature of the world of form that nothing stays fixed for very long - and so it starts to fall apart again. Forms dissolve; new forms arise. Watch the clouds. They will teach you about the world of form.

All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know.

When you see and accept the impermanent nature of all life forms, a strange sense of peace comes upon you.

A Buddhist monk once told me: "All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know." What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away. The

This, too, will pass...

The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.

The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch.

And what difference does it make, anyway, what you like and what you don't like? You are here for but an instant, and you mustn't take yourself too seriously.

And with these thoughts came a realization of how unimportant to the life and happiness of the world is the existence of any one of us. We may be snuffed out without an instant's warning, and for a brief day our friends speak of us with subdued voices. The following morning, while the first worm is busily engaged in testing the construction of our coffin, they are teeing up for the first hole to suffer more acute sorrow over a sliced ball than they did over our, to us, untimely demise.

We seek the dead only, to return to earth the body, of which no man is the owner, but only for a brief moment the guest. Dust must return to dust again.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

Lady Brightlingsea considered it her duty to fish out of this out darkness, and drag for a moment into the light, any person or obligation entitled to fix her husband's attention; but they always faded back into night as soon as they had served their purpose.

But, my dear, it's just the fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It's because we know we can't hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything...

But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness, of futile bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke into the face of such a past.

He thought to himself, I'll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.

He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they'd all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

The lights of the little highway town ahead spread with their approach and then scattered like flushed prey as they entered its limits. Under the filling-station sheds, swirling insects clouded the naked bulbs. The stores were closed; the depot dark.

She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.

To teach me that a lifetime can be vast as a hundred years or sudden as a few breaths? Enjoy this one you have left. It all passes so fast. In the time it takes to draw a breath.

Consider the world as an abode where in you have dropped down for an hour, then you have got to leave it and go ahead; or (suppose it is) like the wealth which you lay hands upon in a dream and become over-joyed and glad. Then you wake up to find yourself empty handed.

It's no use reminding yourself daily that you are mortal: it will be brought home to you soon enough.

Dans les rues, je suis l'obsédé de ma morte, mornement regardant tous ces agités qui ne savent pas qu'ils vont mourir et que le bois de leur cercueil existe déjà dans une scierie ou dans une forêt, vaguement regardant ces jeunes et fardés futurs cadavres femelles qui rient avec leurs dents, annonce et commencement de leur squelette, qui montrent leurs trente-deux petits bouts de squelette et qui s'esclaffent comme s'ils ne devaient jamais mourir.

Car l'homme ne vit que durant un clignement de paupières et ensuite c'est la pourriture à jamais, et chaque jour tu fais un pas de plus vers le trou en terre où tu moisiras en grande stupidité et silence en la seule compagnie de vers blancs et gras comme ceux de la farine et du fromage, et ils s'introduiront dans tous tes orifices pour s'y nourrir.