Quotes About Impermanence

The great mountain must collapse, the mighty beam must break and the wise man wither like a plant.

A man's renown is like the hue of grass, Which comes and goes.

When I was a young man, near the beginning of my life, I looked around with true mindfulness and saw that all things are subject to decay.

If man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.

...small too even the longest fame thereafter, which is itself subject to a succession of little men who quickly die, and have no knowledge of themselves, let alone of those long dead.

When a man dies he kicks the dust.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

The changing year's successive plan Proclaims mortality to man.

Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils.

Everything you gather is just one that you can lose.

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.

Strong winds do not last all morning, hard rains do not last all day.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

Nothing is ever going to describe in words what your mother looked like at twenty when the moonlight just fell on her face in such a way. Only a picture can show you that.

When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.

We are identifying with what is passing so fear comes. We are trying to make steady and permanent what is by nature impermanent.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!

Beauty's of a fading nature. Has a season and is gone!

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Nature has given man no better thing than shortness of life.

A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent--sweet, not lasting; The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.

In the nature of things, I must soon lose sight of this sense of constant metamorphosis whose limits bound our human life.

These births and deaths are changes in nature which we are mistaking for changes in us.