Quotes About Impermanence

I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

Si he dejado una herida en tu interior, esta herida no es solo tuya, tambien es mia. Ai que no me odies por ello. Soy un ser imperfecto. Mucho mas imperfecto de lo que tu crees

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

There can be no meaning in what will someday be lost. Passing glory is not true glory at all.

Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated.

As you may know, in this Town, memory is unreliable and uncertain. There are things we can remember and things we cannot remember.

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything.

Nothing stayed still. And time was lost. Behind me, time became dead grains of sand, which one after another gave way and vanished.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.

Vlinders zijn de meest vergankelijke, gracieuze schepsels ter wereld. Ze worden uit het niets geboren, verlangen stilletjes naar iets heel kleins en beperkts, om uiteindelijk weer als in het niets te verdwijnen.

Pierrot knew that everything in the world was alive. Everything was composed of molecules that shook and vibrated and hummed. There was no such thing as permanence. Even the most stalwart object—such as a statue in the park—was struggling to keep itself together.

That could stay, not forever, because we believe that nothing exists that is forever, not even the dinosaurs, but if well maintained, it could remain for four to five thousand years. And that is definitely not forever.

All things are only transitory.

Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune, nor too sorrowful in misfortune.

But, in fact, impermanence is like some of the people we meet in life—difficult and disturbing at first, but on deeper acquaintance far friendlier and less unnerving than we could have imagined.

Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can layabout it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide-and-seek and think that no one can see them.

I shall never forget when Dudjom Rinpoche, in a moment of intimacy, leaned toward me and said in his soft, hoarse, slightly high-pitched voice: "You know, don't you, that actually all these things around us go away, just go away . . ." With

Taking impermanence truly to heart is to be slowly freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed and destructive view of permanence, from the false passion for security on which we have built everything.

You see, we are all dying. It's only a matter of time.

What a beautiful and what a healing mystery it is that from contemplating, continually and fearlessly, the truth of change and impermanence, we come slowly to find ourselves face to face, in gratitude and joy, with the truth of the changeless, with the truth of the deathless, unending nature of mind!

begin with a series of deep contemplations on the uniqueness of human life the ever-presence of impermanence and death the infallibility of the cause and effect of our actions the vicious cycle of frustration and suffering that is samsara.