Quotes About Impermanence

Sappiamo bene che ogni opera è necessariamente imperfetta, e che la meno sicura delle nostre contemplazioni estetiche sarà quella di cui scriviamo. Ma tutto è imperfetto, non c'è tramonto così bello da non poterlo essere di più, o brezza lieve che invita al sonno che non possa favorire un sonno ancor più sereno.

Onder het wandelen bedenk ik vaak volmaakte zinnen, die ik me later thuis niet meer kan herinneren. Ik weet niet of de ontzaglijke poëtische kracht van die zinnen berust op hun inhoud of op het feit dat ze nooit hebben bestaan.

Todos los movimientos y las intenciones de la vida, desde la vida sencilla de los pulmones hasta la construcción de ciudades y el trazado de fronteras de imperios, los considero como una somnolencia, cosas como sueños o descansos pasadas involuntariamente en el intervalo entre una realidad y otra realidad, entre un día y otro día del Absoluto.

No tenemos, es cierto, un concepto de valor de aplicación a la obra que realizamos. La realizamos, es verdad, para distraernos, pero no como el preso que teje el esparto tratando de distraer al Destino, sino como la niña que borda almohadas para distraerse sin más. Considero la vida un apeadero donde tengo que esperar hasta que llegue la diligencia del abismo. No

Todo cuanto vive, vive porque cambia; cambia porque pasa; y, porque pasa, muere.

The things we achieve, whether empires or sentences, have (because they've been achieved) that fatal defect of real things: the fact they're perishable.

I like things that are just about to go. Everything's leaving. Death is never far away from me. When you make something, death can't help but be in it.

Bubbles are one of the few things in life that we are allowed to break.

I have realised that we are running after things that are so temporary and fleeting - be it fame or money or anything like that.

Crowd work has this feeling of being very temporary and of the moment, and I think that's why it sometimes gets a bad rap or a stigma.

In the medium or long term we'll all be dead. Let's deal with the problems at hand.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two. - 1959, from a catalogue

Consider misunderstood loss as a derailment. When you understand impermanence, when you understand that change is truly the only constant in a space-time continuum, then you understand that such losses come and go.

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.

Appearance implies disappearance also: whatever appears must also disappear.

So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn't really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that "form is not-self." We are not our bodies.

One of the Buddha's main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more.

One of the Buddha's main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more.

three marks of existence

What's fundamental to the Buddha's teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best.

Me verá una doncella, una niña alta, pálida y concentrada, que por capricho maneje su Rolls-Royce. Paseará tristemente. De pronto me mira y comprende que yo seré el único amor de toda la vida, y esa mirada que era un ultraje para todos los desdichados, se posará en mí, cubiertos los ojos de lágrimas. El ensueño se desenroscaba sobre

While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.

Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand.