Quotes About Impermanence

How bright we all bur. No wonder we were not made to last.

Così come noi siamo fatti per un decimo di tessuti viventi e per nove decimi di acqua, così la vita è per un decimo Qui e Ora, e per nove decimi è una lezione di storia. Per la maggior parte del tempo, il Qui e Ora non è nè qui nè ora.

But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near

There's no such thing as forever.

Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two - is gone.

The worldly stuff is not always going to be there and it could be taken away at any moment.

In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.

I'm the worst person to be stuck with in a traffic jam.

The 'looking forward' so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/11 magnified this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own impermanence.

I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'

Life is short, and certainty never happens.

This is the beauty of imagination. An unexpected dead end in one journey is merely an opportunity to set a new course for another. Losing what we have can only do us real harm when we feel we can't create it, or something equally valuable or compelling, again, and that ability resides squarely in our imagination.

in human affairs everything is hastiness and farewell.

All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty.

We need everything perfect in a rather temporary life...

This body is not a home but an inn, and that only briefly.

The body is not a permanent dwelling, but a sort of inn which is to be left behind when one perceives that one is a burden to the host.

Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.

Tell you now children—you're all gonna die. No hand stamp reentry, no refund, no lie. —Found written on a bathroom stall in Disneyland, June 6th, 1988

All that may be wished for, will by nature fade to nothing.

Like a dream, Whatever I enjoy Will become a memory; The past is not revisited.

Many cells inside my ears, in the ossicle, and malleus, cochlea, have died where they lived and worked—I don't know if they're there, still, looking like themselves but dead, or if their corpses wore away, broke down to their elements and were shuffled off by capillaries, I don't know if I peed them out and now they're in an ocean bay or trench, or if I breathed them out, I might breathe one in again.