Quotes About Impermanence

Everything is temporary if you give it enough time.

If you are the body, you are in terrible trouble! One small microbe will destroy it one day, if not an accident. You have but a short time to live in this world.

Since time is a continuum, the moment is always different, so the music is always different.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

Time is not kind to everything.

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.

You see, we are all dying. It's only a matter of time. Some of us just die sooner than others.

He'd had a dog once, in that way he'd had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting.

In all we do, and hear, and see, Is restless Toil and Vanity. While yet the rolling earth abides, Men come and go like ocean tides

There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn't: it's simply the nature of human life.

It was never meant to be permanent. You must have known the tide would come back in.

You never get over certain losses, but the anguish part eventually ends, and it all just sucks for a while. There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn't: it's simply the nature of human life.

Robert Burns said it best: "Life is but a day at most.

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.

Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.

Malady of mortality

It is the very nature of this world that all things are devoured and time is a mouth as bloody as any other.

Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.

To dust is only to forestall burial

An infant is a pucker of the earth's thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeasts and break off: we forget our beginnings. A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I have finished swelling: our circling periods are playing out, but we can still leave footprints on a trail whose end we do not know. Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think you can go it alone.

Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the 'augenblick', "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the 'augenblick' isn't going to 'verweile'. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless.

The world in which we live is no more real than a moon beam reflected in water drawn from the palm of the hand...

The fulfillment we have in owning, in desiring, is temporary and illusory, because there is nothing at all we can have that we will not lose eventually. And so there is always fear.