Quotes About Impermanence

Were mind and matter me, I would come and go like them. If I were something else, They would say nothing about me. —N?G?RJUNA, M?lamadhyamaka-k

these practices began to yield unorthodox results. Meditation on impermanence, suffering, and no-self, for example, did not—as the Buddha insisted it would—lead me to disenchantment, dispassion, and a resolve not to be born again but to an ever-deepening awareness of life's infinitely poignant beauty.

When my self is no longer the all-consuming preoccupation it once was, when I see it as one narrative thread among myriad others, when I understand it to be as contingent and transient as anything else, then the barrier that separates "me" from "not me" begins to crumble. The conviction of being a closed cell of self is not only delusive but anesthetic. It numbs me to the suffering of the world.

Life is a groundless ground: no sooner does it appear, than it disappears, only to renew itself, then immediately break up and vanish again. It pours forth endlessly, like the river of Heraclitus into which one cannot step twice. If you try to grasp it, it slips away between your fingers.

One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This is not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be.

Gotama did for the self what Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear just as it did before. Gotama no more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.

ONCE, I KNEW A FINE SONG, —IT IS TRUE, BELIEVE ME,— IT WAS ALL OF BIRDS, AND I HELD THEM IN A BASKET; WHEN I OPENED THE WICKET, HEAVENS! THEY ALL FLEW AWAY. I CRIED, 'COME BACK, LITTLE THOUGHTS!' BUT THEY ONLY LAUGHED. THEY FLEW ON UNTIL THEY WERE AS SAND THROWN BETWEEN ME AND THE SKY.

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

Time and tide wait for no man.

We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.

The magic fades too fastthe scent of summer never lasts the nights turn hollow and vast but nothing remains...nothing lasts.

Man sometimes forget, he will not live forever.

Not every good thing in life will remain forever

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world - not even our troubles.

Everything is impermanent, except the love of God.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it....In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem.

Understand that you own nothing. Everything that surrounds you is temporary. Only the love in your heart will last forever.

You make beauty and it disappears, I love that.

Nothing lasts forever, so what makes love the exception.

daug sapn? jie ateina ir v?l pradingsta išblunka iš atminties

Ir nieko n?ra pastovaus - kaip m?s? širdys - ir viskas, kas tariam stovi ant tvirto pagrindo, yra tiek tikra, kiek m?nulis šulin?. Ir viskas plaukia ir siubuoja visatoje, kaip japon? nameliai. Toks yra mano sielos pasaulis - ir jis n?ra j?s?.

life is much like a movie we walk into well after its opening scene, and we will have to step out long before most of the story lines reach their conclusions.

We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.

Did the sudden dark remind you that all of the things we expect to be there for us, to protect us, shelter us, provide for us, are fleeting and finite?