Quotes About Impermanence

It was Heraclitus, of course, who came up with the formulation that we are never able to step into the same river twice. ... The obverse of Heraclitus's maxim may be that one is never able to step out of the river the same, twice. A neuron in the brain is altered with every experience. The self, if it exists, must be a constantly evolving thing. Those coming to the banks of the Ganges or Jordan to immerse themselves do not expect to leave the same as they arrive.

Everything may evaporate at any instant. Everything!' I said with surprising vehemence. 'You, me, the most rocklike personality since Calving Coolidge; death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is insanity.

Life is what you remember, Nan thinks as she shoves dirt into the old sneaker. Who can remember everything? Well, no one, and that's a blessing. Life is and always has been a composition, much like this garden; it will not be contained and cannot be determined.

There is living and there is death," the Emperor said. "Pain is irrelevant unless it leads to the latter.

It makes good times even better when you know they are going to end. Like grilled vegetables are better because some of them are partly soot.

because nothing means as much until it has vanished.

Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.

The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

He had no chance, really. He was only flesh.

By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.

Memories were built of air, and blew away.

How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore.

All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.

His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now,therefore I am happy' , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Here lies one whose name was writ on water.

When I have fears that I may ceace to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teaming brain.

Nada es estable en el mundo. El tumulto es vuestra única música.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charact'ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain … When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be

How light Must dreams themselves be; seeing they're more slight Than the mere nothing that engenders them!

Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed

Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

Crowns and thrones are all bodies which rise and perish and leave the world as it is.

All compounded things are subject to decay. Strive with diligence!