Quotes About Impermanence

What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.

This won't last forever, but it's wonderful while it's happening.

Most of all, he loved Celia Johnson, her hats,her face,her cracked porcelain voice: 'This can't last. This misery can't last.Nothing lasts really,neither happiness nor despair.Not even life lasts long....There'll come a time in the future when i shan't mind about this any more....

Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.

The time always flees; it will wait for no man. And through you are still in the flower of your young manhood, age creeps on steadily, as quiet as a stone, and death meanaces every age and strikes in every rank, for no one escapes. As surely as we know that we will die, so we are uncertain of the day when death shall fall on us.

The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

How can He be perfect? Everything He ever makes...dies.

I've done commercials and won awards, but I know that this won't last forever.

Words and ideas work in the short run to get you through school and to impress educators and employers. But they do not work in the long run or in the deep run. We soon find ourselves separate and without wonder.

The logs of wood which move down the river together Are driven apart by every wave. Such inevitable parting Should not be the cause of misery.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.

Since nowhere can be home let me live nowhere in this scant hut in this brief world

Every single thing changes and is changing always in this world. Yet with the same light the moon goes on shining.

Every day we are changing, every day we are dying, and yet we fancy ourselves eternal.

Even buddhas are subject to the conditions in which they appear, and enlightenment is not a fixed state that we can hold on to. It must be renewed, rediscovered, as we ourselves are renewed and rediscovered.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me

photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my "remembering," I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.

Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die

Summer grasses: all that remains of great soldiers' imperial dreams

I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the thing that we hold in memory