Quotes About Impermanence

Remind yourself that what you love is mortal … at the very moment you are taking joy in something, present yourself with the opposite impressions. What harm is it, just when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die, or to your friend similarly: Tomorrow one of us will go away, and we shall not see one another any more?

The object of your love is mortal; it is not one of your possessions; it has been given to you for the present, not inseparably nor forever." (Epictetus, The Discourses)

For I am not everlasting, but a human being, a part of the whole as an hour is a part of the day. Like an hour I must come, and like an hour pass away.

Having this, then, we must inherit that; destroying this, then that is ended too; no birth, old age, disease, or death; no earth, or water, fire, or wind. No beginning, end, or middle; and no deceptive systems of philosophy; this is the standpoint of wise men and sages; the certain and exhausted termination, complete Nirvâna. Such

nothings promised, not the rest of tonight, not all of tomorrow!

These bits speak history's tattered tale. How we cling to scraps, shards, sea glass- because we cannot stay.

Nous les aimons, ils meurent. Nous avons beau essayé de les retenir, ils nous glissent entre les doigts, ils s'en vont, ils meurent.

I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning.

We think- oh, we will never forget these northern lights, but we do. What we remember is only the curling picture in the left-hand drawer (Presque Isle, Maine, 1934) or a gorgeous half-page photo in an old travel magazine, but what we saw when we held hands, lifting our chins to the sky as if we could leap into the jagged, jeweled brilliance above us, was seen for ten seconds only, and never again.

We do not ask the trees to teach us moral lessons, and only the Salvation Army feels it necessary to pin texts upon them. We know that these texts are ridiculous, but many of us do not yet see that to write an obvious moral all over a work of art, picture, statue, or poem, is not only ridiculous, but timid and vulgar. We distrust a beauty we only half understand, and rush in with our impertinent suggestions.

Yet after brick and steel and stone are gone, and flesh and blood are dust, the dream lives on.

In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.

for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us…

Çok güzel anlar hüzünlüdür her zaman. Geçici olduklar?n? duyar insan, durdurmak ister, bir ?ey gelmez elinden. Çocukken hep sirkte duyard?m bunu, daha sonra da konserde, çok mutlu oldu?um zaman. "?ki saate kadar bitecek," derdim içimden.

Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process.

As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

In the theater, everything is ephemeral. Everything is almost weightless and without a very clear definition of how you made it.

The problem in cinema is that you can never predict what will happen.

The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future.

Everything isn't permanent, so don't pretend that it is. Everything's supposed to move and shift.

In the long run we are all dead.

There's certainly nothing lasting and definite about the theater.