Quotes About Impermanence

Everything speaks of what it has been: the leg bone of a wading bird holds the image of that bird standing on the mud of a shoreline, poised on its own mirror reflection.

It's only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.

Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.

No matter how important the present appeared, it soon turned to the past

Hemos imaginado el mundo. ¿Qué otra cosa puede imaginarse si no es la propia muerte? El sonido de una campana y todo ha terminado.

Nous sommes fous de vouloir éterniser les sentiments: ils sont aussi passagers que nous. Les choses finissent et nous refusons de l'admettre.

La Beauté finit en Laideur, le destin de la Jeunesse est d'être Flétrie, la Vie n'est qu'un lent Pourrissement, nous Mourons chaque Jour.

Our days on earth are as a shadow. 1 CHRONICLES 29:15

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

It is good to have a reminder of death before us, for it helps us to understand the impermanence of life on this earth, and this understanding may aid us in preparing for our own death. He who is well prepared is he who knows that he is nothing compared with Wakan-Tanka who is everything; then he knows that world which is real.

To appear for a little time and then vanish away, is the outward biography of all men, a circle of smoke that breaks, a bubble on the stream that bursts, a spark put out by a breath.

For every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear, One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away.

Buddhas move freely through birth and death, appearing and disappearing at will.

As part of the Six Element Practice, for example, we may repeat the phrase, "This is not me; this is not mine; I am not this." A verse such as this is, as it were, dropped into the mind.

AM went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with interest at all the pock marks he had created in one hundred and nine years.

As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.

Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.

I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

When people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it to give the viewer a sense of the object's actual size, but the pack of cigarettes next to the images in my memory expanded and contracted, depending on my mood at the time. Like the objects and events in constant flux, or perhaps in opposition to them, what should have been a fixed yardstick inside the framework of my memory seemed instead to be in perpetual motion.