Quotes About Impermanence

Doubtless my books, like my fleshly being, would, some day, die. But one must resign oneself to death. One accepts the thought that one will die in ten years and one's books in a hundred. Eternal duration is no more promised to works than to men.

Of a different order again were those of M. de Charlus, as we shall presently see, with people wholly unlike Mme. de Villeparisis. In spite of which we must bear in mind that the opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk, are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

No doubt it is because memories do not remain true for ever, and because life is made up of the endless renewal of cells, that love is not eternal.

Keep constantly in mind in how many things you yourself have witnessed changes already. The universe is change, life is understanding.

Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted. Matter is in perpetual flux. Change is always and everywhere at work; it strikes through causes and effects, and leaves nothing fixed and permanent.

You will quickly be reduced to ashes and skeleton. And it may be you will have a name left you, and it may be not. And what is a name? Nothing but sound and echo.

All is ephemeral--fame and the famous as well.

Consider that as the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands, so in life the events that go before are soon covered by those that come after.

Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.

Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold? Like an attachment to a sparrow: we glimpse it and it's gone.

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 the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.

Kultur und Todeswissen sind eng miteinander verflochten, wir wissen um die Kurzfristigkeit, um die Begrenztheit des Lebens. Das Gewahrwerden des eigenen Todes ist entscheidende Bedingung für die kulturelle Schöpferkraft. Kultur verspricht Dauer, Kultur schöpft Sinn, Kultur handelt mit Transzendenz. Ihr implizites Ziel ist es, das, was vorgegeben ist, zu überschreiten und ihm so Dauer zu verleihen.

Schopenhauer once put it, we insist on living our lives "with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.

You don't really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind.

We don't like flowers that donot wilt; they must die, and nineshe-camel hairs aid memory.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

one must not borrow a long white beard and tie it on and threaten with the scythe of time the casually curious

Having examined three thousand haiku poems - two persimmons.

So there's only transcendence in the moment. Nobody can be transcended forever. That's why I say, "Who cares if you're enlightened forever?"

Be proud of yourself and your achievement but don't be arrogant remember you may have everything today but nothing lasts forever.

Nothing is lasting but change; nothing perpetual but death