Quotes About Impermanence

He noticed that Ursula's ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.

When Theo returned along St. Andrews Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing

The home in which you reside it not forever.

The way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline. He'd been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy's, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.

Stardust is the hardest thing to hold out for. You must make of yourself a perfect plane- something still upon which something settles- something like sugar grains on something like metal, but with none of the chill. It's hard to explain. Stardust

No Names There are high places that don't invite us, sharp shapes, glacier- scraped faces, whole ranges whose given names slip off. Any such relation as we try to make refuses to take. Some high lakes are not for us, some slick escarpments. I'm giddy with thinking where thinking can't stick.

The best things, he always used to say, are put together of a night and vanish with the morning. What people call the floating world, Ono, was a world Gisaburo knew how to value.

My imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

Nothing is permanent, except change.

Nada es perdurable, salvo el cambio.

You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely sure of its treacherous impermanence. And that is all.

You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely certain of its treacherous impermanence.

No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.

A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.

Death comes suddenly and life is fragile and brief. No one can alter this either by prayers or spells.

Todas las cosas se derrumban y dejan de ser, y no hay nada que pase más rápido que la vida de un hombre feliz.

Renunciation simply means a state of un-attachment. A big house and a new car should be enjoyed to their fullest so long as we accept them as things that can and will go away. We never really own anything; we hold title, rent, lease, use, and borrow things during our short visit here. Impermanence is just another name for perfection.

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

What is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?And, live we how we can, yet die we must.

would not be for the sake of a woman five years dead whose image in my mind was now as evanescent as the smell of lavender in an old drawer.

And in the end, Jody again has his pony—but at the terrible cost of learning even the most wondrous gifts are sometimes impermanent.

Buddhism clearly explains that suffering emerges in our hearts because we forget the principle of impermanence and believe that what we possess will last forever.

Buddhism teaches us to recognize these cycles of impermanence and have the courage to accept them.