Quotes About Impermanence

According to this very simple teaching, becoming immersed in these four pairs of opposites—pleasure and pain, loss and gain, fame and disgrace, and praise and blame—is what keeps us stuck in the pain of samsara.

Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about.

There's a richness to all of the smelly stuff that we so dislike and so little desire. The delightful things—what we love so dearly about ourselves, the places in which we feel some sense of pride or inspiration—these also are our wealth.

Happiness "disappears in a moment," he says, "like a dewdrop on a blade of grass."* Basing your comfort on things that don't last is a futile strategy for living.

For one thing, I let go much more easily: knowing that it's all passing so quickly makes everything I encounter exceedingly precious. I know that every taste, every smell, every day, every meeting, every parting, could be my last. When I see people bent over, shuffling along on walkers, I know what could be ahead for me. I've begun to identify with the very elderly so intimately that instead of recoiling, I feel immense compassion.

Good or bad, happy or sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn't mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don't have to feel it's happening because we personally made the wrong move.

The first noble truth says simply that it's part of being human to feel discomfort.

Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn't last forever.

The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's samsara. The

THE BUDDHA TAUGHT that there are three principal characteristics of human existence: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. According to the Buddha, the lives of all beings are marked by these three qualities. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are. When

When my children were teenagers, I took them to meet the Sixteenth Karmapa. As they weren't Buddhists, I asked His Holiness to say something that didn't require any understanding of the dharma. Without hesitating, he told them: "You are going to die; and when you do, you will take nothing with you but your state of mind.

What a predicament! We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we're part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.

The secret of Zen is just two words: not always so. —SHUNRYU SUZUKI ROSHI

Basing your comfort on things that don't last is a futile strategy for living. Even when you get something you've always wanted, the pleasure you get lasts for such a short time.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging, and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to you. If you got burned or cut, it would hurt.

La impermanencia es la bondad de la realidad. Todo evoluciona constantemente, como las cuatro estaciones que están en continuo flujo: del invierno pasamos a la primavera, al verano y después al otoño; como el día que se convierte en noche: la luz que se convierte en oscuridad y pasa a ser nuevamente luz. La impermanencia es la esencia de todo:

Só encontraremos aquilo que é indestrutível em nós à medida que nos expusermos cada vez mais à destruição

We suffer... because of three tragic misunderstandings. First, we expect that what is always in the process of change should be graspable and predictable... Second, we proceed as if we are separate from everything else, as if we are a fixed identity, when our true situation is egoless... Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Buddha called this habit "mistaking suffering for happiness.