Quotes About Impermanence

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: And this, too, shall pass away.

In the physical world we know, nothing lasts forever – a thought I find strangely comforting.

Det er bare det vi har mistet, som fremstår som evig uforanderlig.

Even dead, we bony creatures do our best to leave a mark-- if not a mask of beaten gold or a casket engraved with feathers, perhaps a richer concentration of fungus, a patch where grass is younger and thicker, a sunken place in a field.

as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.

You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

People don't usually bother me very much, since they are, after all, only flesh and blood, and I know very well just how fragile and transitory that is. But

Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked. To

In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.

Did he realized nothing would last, that sooner or later every last speck and smidgeon of matter would disapper?

No, no, we are definitely writ on water. Or cognac -- if we've any luck at all.

everything is temporary if you give it enough time...

The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn't care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can't be defined.

No effect of work can be eternal.

If you know that whatever is made inevitable breaks down, you needn't seek too hard for achievement. If you know that all living beings inevitably die, you needn't work too hard on health lore.

The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There's no such thing as permanence at all.

To be satisfied with what I have. Not to postpone things. That life is fragile.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

All the baubles offered by the material world fail to satisfy because they are themselves products of finitude and impermanent by nature.

After the dead words, after the ones still said and spoken, what do you expect? Some flying leaves, more scattered papers. Who knows? Some dissolving words, like the light or the echo dying out there in the great night.