Quotes About Impermanence

Even when months and days are long, life is short.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

For all mortals, birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering.

We're afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever... Instead, acting it out is what makes it last.

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation./He went flying down the river in his boat/with his video camera to his eye, making/a moving picture of the moving river/...[At the end of his vacation,]/With a flick of the switch, there it would be./But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

There's really no point in doing anything in life because it's all over in the blink of an eye. The next thing you know, rigor mortis sets in.

It is clear that as our walking is admittedly nothing but a constantly-prevented falling, so the life of our bodies is nothing but a constantly-prevented dying, an ever-postponed death."86

Allo stesso tempo in giapponese ci sono due parole, wabi e sabi, che messe insieme significano bellezza effimera e fluttuante; estetica della decadenza, dei dettagli asimmetrici e dei colori naturali; gusto per il non finito, il transeunte, l'imperfetto. Per spiegare cosa significano queste quattro sillabe giapponesi nelle nostre lingue bisogna scrivere dei mini trattati.

It's just a moment, we die every night.

Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.

What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.

Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They're quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reactions.

It was such an easy thing, death. He saw that now: It just happened. You screwed up by a fraction and there it was, something chill and odorless, ballooning out from the four stupid corners of the room, your mother's Barrytown living room.

Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it. (When asked what will save humanity.)

All things in this world change and pass away— some after many years, some overnight.

The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don't get attached to them.

We are not interested in developing eternity or immortality, or in preventing being sick or being born. We are interested in doing something while we are alive, while we are breathing, while we can see the beauty of the snow, the flowers, the blue sky, the sunshine, and the many other things we can imagine.

There are things you can only say with a canyon. Or smoke moving across a vally toward the mist.

FLOWERS FADE, FREEZE in an early frost, wither on the vine. Trees burst into flame and burn themselves out. Leaves crumble to ash.

La vacuité d'un phénomène ou d'une chose, ce n'est pas son inexistence ni son absence, mais sa nature instable, mobile, subjective, complexe…

JENNET: They also say that I bring back the past; For instance Helen comes Brushing the maggots from her eyes, And, clearing here throat of the dust of several thousand years She says "I loved ..."; but cannot any longer Remember names. Sad Helen. Or Alexander, wearing His imperial cobwebs and breastplate of shining worms Wakens and looks for his glasses, to find the empire Which he knows he put beside his bed.

They say that I bring back the past; For instance, Helen comes, Brushing the maggots from her eyes, And, clearing her throat of several thousand years, She says 'I loved . . .'; but cannot any longer Remember names. Sad Helen. Or Alexander, wearing His imperial cobwebs and breastplate of shining worms Wakens and looks for his glasses, to find the empire Which he knows he put beside his bed.

The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.