Quotes About Impermanence

I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.

Right Understanding means feeling terrible, remembering pain is finite, and taking some solace from that remembering. And, when things are pleasant, even splendidly pleasant, remembering impermanence doesn't diminish the experience--it enhances it [p. 33]

If I can't see around my personal story, I'll have no way to see sit in context: This is one event in a life of events. It is whatever it is, but it is temporal. The pain is terrible, but it won't last. I can manage it. or this joy is incredible, but it won't last. Celebrate it now! [pp. 104-105]

Fear doesn't frighten me as much as it used to. I know it's from clinging, and I know it will pass [p. 29].

The next-to-last sentence that the Buddha is reported to have spoken as he was dying, before his final sentence of encouragement to his community, was "Transient are all conditioned things.

One cannot step twice into the same river

Actually, from the Buddhist context all words—and all beings—are verbs, in dynamic activity.

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind

a tiny gemstone, a tiny spark of color slipping between your fingers and through the cracks and gone. A heart the size of a fleck of glitter and vibrating like a hummingbird, seeded with a billion things that would never happen now.

Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…

am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities.

The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.

We are all dust All dying All losing All forgetting We are all leaving all the time

We are all dust.

There is no fixed, solid, permanent self—just a series of changing patterns of experience.

As I noticed feelings and thoughts appear and disappear, it became increasingly clear that they were just coming and going on their own. . . . There was no sense of a self owning them.

Everything within and around us is subject to change; the truth that if we try to hold on to or resist the stream of experience, we deepen the trance of fear.

no matter how hard we try to control life, we have no sway over the bedrock realities of change, loss, and mortality.

Radical Acceptance is the art of engaging fully in this world — wholeheartedly caring about the preciousness of life — while also resting in the formless awareness that allows this life to arise and pass away.

No matter the level of subtlety of view, all Buddhist schools agree that only a previous moment of mind can cause the present moment of mind.

The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we've led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them were inevitable.

Because even if a universe's life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we've led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

The greatest wonder is never being able to know what will happen next. No matter how hard you try, the future will always be ahead of you.