Quotes About Impermanence

The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.

No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.

For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

There was a contest in Ancient Greece to find out who could write a sentence that would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was "This too shall pass.

out the window onto the freeway, where it was run over several hundred times in the next hour or so, before

We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered. "Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

If only I wouldn't take this book so seriously. It is just a book after all, and a book is very dead in a very short time. And I'll be dead in a very short time too. So the hell with it. Let's slow down, not in pace or wordage but in nerves.

Maybe that's what ghosts are

Ogni cosa sotto il cielo finisce, e se si ritiene che la temporalità ne infici il valore, allora nulla che sia reale ottiene mai il successo.

We are not meditating to make anything go away, any more than we are meditating to attain some special state or feeling. Whether we are basically healthy at the moment or have a terminal illness, none of us knows how long we have to live.

Note that an individual thought does not last long. It is impermanent. If it comes, it will go.

The Tibetans sometimes describe thoughts as writing on water, in essence empty, insubstantial, and transient.

Profoundly healing insights may arise if you are willing to look deeply into your emotional pain as it is occurring, as well as in its aftermath. One major realization you might come to is the inevitability of change, the direct perception that, whether we like it or not, impermanence is in the very nature of things and relationships.

even and especially as we are being confronted with the law of impermanence and the inevitability of change, conditions we are subject to as individuals regardless of how much we resist or protest or try to control outcomes. If we wish to make a quantum leap to greater awareness, there is no getting around the need for us to be willing to wake up, and to care deeply about waking up.

A moment might be a thousand different things.

Nothing is permanent in the wicked world, not even our TROUBLES.

To avoid sufferings, one must learn to adapt, learn some flexibility and realize that Everything changes, and this is beautiful.

Nothing is interminable - All is but transient, for even set stone can be broken.

You can't plan life. Because no matter how perfect your plan is, life has a way to rearrange it.