Quotes About Impermanence

Time waits for no one.

You cannot step twice into the same river for other waters are continually flowing on.

If man were never to fade away ... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.

History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man's power in the world.

Nothing is forever, if you have enough power tools.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.

we should love all of our dear ones …, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.

all we have is "on loan" from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice. Thus,

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.

Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that "all things everywhere are perishable.

Some people, I realize, will find it depressing or even morbid to contemplate impermanence. I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts.

I must die. If forthwith, I die; and if a little later, I will take lunch now,

Like Buddhists, Stoics advise us to contemplate the world's impermanence. "All things human," Seneca reminds us, "are short-lived and perishable."19

the "flux and change" of the world around us are not an accident but an essential part of our universe.20

everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us. If nothing else, our own death will deprive us of them. More generally, we should keep in mind that any human activity that cannot be carried on indefinitely must have a final occurrence.

remember that all we have is "on loan" from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice.

but the man had never learned to wait, he was permanently in a hurry. when, in april, he planted heads of mignonette or morning glory in the china pots in his living room, he would go and pull their leaves each morning to make them grow faster. with such an eccentric, the only thing to do was to obey.

I came alone and I go as a stranger. The instant which has passed in power has left only sorrow behind it. I have not been the guardian and protector of the Empire. Life, so valuable, has been squandered in vain. God was in my heart but I could not see him. Life is transient. The past is gone and there is no hope for the future. The whole imperial army is like me: bewildered, perturbed, separated from God, quaking like quicksilver.

Yisterday fair up sprang the flouris,This day thai are all slane with schouris;And fowles in forrest that sang cleirNow walkis with a drery cheir;Full caild are baith thair beddis and bouris.

As dust that drives, as straws that blow,Into the night go one and all.

Or in the words of Tennyson: There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O, earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.

But intentions could be like cloud animals in the sky, so clear for a while, then shifting, then fading, then gone.

Time has a savage way of gnawing away at life, leaving it transitory and incomplete, so that life in its fullness can never be enjoyed by any temporal being.