Quotes About Impermanence

Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet.

Joy and sorrow, beauty and deformity, equally pass away.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

That's the hell of sand castles. They are always doomed. That's part of their beauty — their impermanence.

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.

Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.

Golden lads and girls all must, like chimmney-sweepers, come to dust.

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.

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. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long

Thich Nhat Hanh says, "It's not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

This very moment is the perfect teacher.

We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid.

Rather than living a life of resistance and trying to disprove our basic situation of impermanence and change, we could contact the fundamental ambiguity and welcome it. We don't like to think of ourselves as fixed and unchanging, but emotionally we're very invested in it. We simply don't want the frightening, uneasy discomfort of feeling groundless.

A fresh attitude starts to happen when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday, and now it is gone; today is today and now it is new. It is like that—every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new. —DZIGAR KONGTRUL RINPOCHE

ACCORDING TO THE BUDDHA, the lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are.

Pema Chödrön

BY WEAVING our opinions, prejudices, strategies, and emotions into a solid reality, we try to make a big deal out of ourselves, out of our pain, out of our problems. But things are not as solid, predictable, or seamless as they seem.

We're always in an intermediate state between the past and the future, between the memory of what happened before and the approaching experience that will soon become memory as well.

Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent

these constructs are constantly changing. Each situation, each thought, each word, each feeling, is just a passing memory.

Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent, we suffer.

Each situation, each thought, each word, each feeling, is just a passing memory.

Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.

suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.