Quotes & Sayings About Impermanence

Autumn
The passion
Is still flourishing in the branches
Yellow funny and daring red
The sun warms even in the days
Where the fog
Stubbornly in the morning
From a distance
A woodpecker knocks
Impermanence
Is the enemy of beauty — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

It is not only the size of these redwoods but their strangeness that frightens them. And why not? For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far back in geologic time as the upper Jurassic period. Fossils of these ancients have been found dating from the Cretaceous era while in the Eocene and Miocene they were spread over England and Europe and America. And then the glaciers moved down and wiped the Titans out beyond recovery. And only these few are left
a stunning memory of what the world was like once long ago. Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it? — John Steinbeck

Fire is a brief, temporary thing - the very definition of impermanence. It comes suddenly, roaring into life when heat and fuel come together and ignite, and dances hungrily while everything around it blackens and curls. When there is nothing left to consume, it disappears, leaving nothing behind but the ash of its unused fuel - those bits of wood and leaf and paper that were too impure to burn, too unworthy to join the fire in its dance. — Dan Wells

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he? — Joan Didion

Life's impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here. It's what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted. — Wes Moore

If dislocation is a permanent state, I want to try and explore the possibility of temporary impermanence. If dislocation is a tatty dress from the thrift store, perhaps the solution is not to cast it aside. If dislocation is a tatty dress, perhaps the only solution is to mend it, scent it, and wear it until everything about it signifies newness, something close to the perpetual promise of a fresh start. — Diriye Osman

But was it worth anything?
That's the hopelessness of it. The openness of it. The part of it I can never understand.
I am afraid of ambiguity and certainity and permanence and impermanence.
And so is everybody else. — Katherine Ewell

Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms - these aren't the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log? — Ken Ilgunas

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns. — Ellen Glasgow

The Jetavana Temple bells
ring the passing of all things.
Twinned sala trees, white in full flower,
declare the great man's certain fall.
The arrogant do not long endure:
They are like a dream one night in spring.
The bold and brave perish in the end:
They are as dust before the wind. — Royall Tyler

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. — Black Elk

When we hold on too tightly to our attachments we are trying to keep them just as they are, to make them permanent. But nothing in life is permanent. — Gyalwa Dokhampa

To recover we must understand and accept impermanence. We must replace the reactive survival instinct of clinging, grasping, and attachment with the wise response of nonclinging, nonattachment, and compassion. In a world where everything is constantly being pulled beyond our grasp, clinging and grasping always result in the rope burns and unnecessary suffering that accompanies it. — Noah Levine

I tell you of loss, my child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours. When you should happen to cry, then cry, knowing that just as easily you will laugh again and cry again. Your feelings will enter the currents of your core and there they shall remain — Thanhha Lai

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal. — Pat Conroy

The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums. Granting the frailty, and no doubt the impermanence, of modern technology as a human contrivance, the man who can keep a fire in a stove or on a hearth is not only more durable, but wiser, closer to the meaning of fire, than the man who can only work a thermostat. — Wendell Berry

We all share an existence marked by suffering and impermanence. Once we recognize how much we have in common, we see that there is no sense in being belligerent with one another. — Dalai Lama XIV

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist. — Milan Kundera

Part of the problem of the city is the impermanence of success. We're only as good as our last deal, — Derek L. Worthington

Seize the day, then let it go. — Marty Rubin

The concept of nutriment depends (a) upon association and (a) upon impermanence and (c) upon hunger. Hunger, seeking for satisfaction, devours x, which is associated with y that gives it satisfaction; but the satisfaction given is impermanent and thereby renews the hunger. "I" hungering for satisfaction, devour (x) food (eye object, taste, smell, touch object), the contact of which is associated with (y) pleasant feeling that gives satisfaction; but the satisfaction given by pleasant feeling is impermanent and by changing renews the pain of hunger. — Nanamoli Thera

In Tibet there were practitioners in retreat who so strongly reflected on impermanence that they would not wash their dishes after supper. - PALTRUL RINPOCHE'S SACRED WORD — Dalai Lama XIV

If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Suffering is described in terms of three characteristics of impermanence or transitory nature, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness. — Dalai Lama XIV

IMPERMANENCE means that the essence of life is fleeting. Some people are so skillful at their mindfulness practice that they can actually see each and every little movement of mind - changing, changing, changing. — Pema Chodron

Ah, the boo. The boo is the most maligned, gossiped about, ridiculed figure in the pantheon of prison characters. Boo, which is short for the street term "booty call," is the casual girlfriend, the cheap feel in the sally port, the temporary object of someone's affections (although most boos don't realize the impermanence of their positions). — Erin George

. . .our whispered words, faintly in the darkness, dissolving
within the trees - then, fleeting words of consolation
would not suffice if feigned, and flippant words
confessed reluctance - our words
were meaningless uttered on the wind. . . — John Daniel Thieme

In the impermanence of life, it was impossible to accept the foreverness of death. — Martine Murray

Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat - these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night they change place before us, and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy; if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind - this is what I call being whole in power. — Zhuangzi

You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely sure of its treacherous impermanence. And that is all. — Ken Kesey

The practice of celibacy alone was opening me up to a deeper sense of the way the mind-body connection works. I saw over and over that my mind and body could be filled with desire and that no matter how intense the craving was it would always pass. I didn't have to satisfy every desire that arose in my mind. I began to understand impermanence through direct experience rather than just intellectual theory. — Noah Levine

I continue to be immensely moved by the impermanence of hotels: not in any mundane Travel-and-Leisure way but with a fervor bordering on the transcendent. Some time in October, right around Day of the Dead actually, I stayed in a Mexican seaside hotel where the halls flowed with blown curtains and all the rooms were named after flowers. The Azalea Room, the Camellia Room, the Oleander Room. Opulence and splendor, breezy corridors that swept into something like eternity and each room with its different colored door. Peony, Wisteria, Rose, Passion Flower. And who knows
but maybe that's what's waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look! — Donna Tartt

On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared. — Bertolt Brecht

Tattoos, for example, are very hard to forget. I think there's something about the impermanence of life these days that makes it necessary to etch ink into our skins. It reminds us that we've been marked by the world, that we're still alive. That we'll never forget. — Tahereh Mafi

The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life. — Gretel Ehrlich

Healing and positive life change comes from having the courage and spiritual conviction to look squarely at life's impermanence. — Meredith L. Young-Sowers

The line between life and death is not thicker than an eyelid. — Eiji Yoshikawa

It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Everything that is real lasts only for a moment. — Marty Rubin

Renunciation simply means a state of un-attachment. A big house and a new car should be enjoyed to their fullest so long as we accept them as things that can and will go away. We never really own anything; we hold title, rent, lease, use, and borrow things during our short visit here. Impermanence is just another name for perfection. — William Reed

We think of life as solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn't have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice. — Jim Harrison

After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward. — Zeena Schreck

Passing pleasures, like passing clouds, are all we have. — Marty Rubin

Matthew and Elspeth knew the Duke of Johannesburg, of course. Matthew had first met him some years earlier when he had gone to a party at Single-Malt House, the Duke's seat. Most of us have houses or flats, but dukes have seats, which conjures up an altogether more comfortable set of domestic arrangements. Professors have chairs, which are not necessarily as comfortable as seats, but better, perhaps, than the mere benches on which judges have to spend their working hours. Least fortunate, of course, are people who have posts or slots - arrangements suggestive of impermanence and discomfort. To say of somebody that "he occupies the post of" is to imply that he has a place, but that he should not become too ensconced as there are others only too ready to take his place, with all the enthusiasm of the would-be stylite, on that post. — Alexander McCall Smith

This physical world, though necessary to our evolution, is the embodiment of impermanence, of constant change. Thus, we take care not to become overly attached to it. — Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security. That is why in Buddhism we don't try to escape from impermanence; we face time itself in our daily living. — Dainin Katagiri

To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death. — Pema Chodron

Whenever ego suffers from fear of death & your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down. — Tsoknyi Rinpoche

All things that have form eventually decay. -Orochimaru — Masashi Kishimoto

The greatest freedom in this world is a sense of self detached from appearances so that we may sacrifice today's comforts for tomorrow's opportunities. — Vironika Tugaleva

"All conditioned things are impermanent" - when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. — Gautama Buddha

Consider the sunlight. You may see it is near, yet if you follow it from world to world you will never catch it in your hands. Then you may describe it as far away and, lo, you will see it just before your eyes. Follow it and, behold, it escapes you; run from it and it follows you close. You can neither possess it nor have done with it. From this example you can understand how it is with the true Nature of all things and, henceforth, there will be no need to grieve or to worry about such things. — Huang Po

Write as if Time will erase every word. — Marty Rubin

Of all the elements in the periodic table, not a single one is indestructible. — Marty Rubin

Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels. — Jack Kornfield

And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things. — Michael Chabon

If we start worrying whether our nose is too big or too small, we should think, "What if I had no head? - now that would be a problem!" As long as we have life, we should rejoice. If everything doesn't go exactly as we'd like, we can accept it. If we contemplate impermanence deeply, patience and compassion will arise. We will hold less to the apparent truth of our experience, and the mind will become more flexible. Realizing that one day this body will be buried or burned, we will rejoice in every moment we have rather than make ourselves or others unhappy. — Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

This idea of how everything is interconnected, and the impermanence of things.. It sums up the human condition to me, and it helps me on my path. — Jeff Bridges

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing endures but change. — Heraclitus

The impermanence of the universe is manifest, inescapable. I know that, yet I am immoderately attached to this life, these pleasures, this place. — Stephanie Mills

Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants. — Ruth Ozeki

What fades, vanishes, decays, dies-that's what one must love. — Marty Rubin

I seem always to enjoy things more intensely because of the certainty they will not last. — W.L. Rusho

Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself. — Josh Lanyon

The delicacy, the impermanence, the emptiness of mind states. Just like the weather, they blow in and out. Good mood. Bad mood. Tranquil mood. Frazzled mood [p. 105]. — Sylvia Boorstein

So much of this trip had been spent gazing at spectacular sights, which always filled me, as this one did now, with agonizing frustration. Why couldn't I simply accept and enjoy beauty? What was it that stirred up this terrible discomfort? ...We agreed it was the impermanence, the inability to possess, the reminder of death. — Lily King

Like the fires caught and fixed by a great colourist from the impermanence of the atmosphere and the sun, so that they should enter and adorn a human dwelling, they invited me, those chrysanthemums, to put away all my sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture during that tea-time hour the all-too-fleeting pleasures of November, whose intimate and mysterious splendour they set ablaze all around me. — Marcel Proust

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. — Rabindranath Tagore

The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay. Behind all this, lies my true self. — Vironika Tugaleva

Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain. — Seneca.

Life is impermanent and in the face of that impermanence, cavort! Look death in the eye, tell him you're as cute as a button, flash a little deviant guile his way, and tell him to go feast on somebody's else's sweet flesh. — Nancy Milford

These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is. — Pessoa, Fernando

I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. — Maggie Nelson

even and especially as we are being confronted with the law of impermanence and the inevitability of change, conditions we are subject to as individuals regardless of how much we resist or protest or try to control outcomes. If we wish to make a quantum leap to greater awareness, there is no getting around the need for us to be willing to wake up, and to care deeply about waking up. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — Sogyal Rinpoche

All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster. — Olaf Stapledon

I believe in the brief eternity of the rose. — Marty Rubin

It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not. — Thich Nhat Hanh

A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead. — Vladimir Nabokov

The dimension of space and time, represented by what is transpiring in the here and now, is all that we will ever know. Unlike the continuum of perpetual time and infinite space, everything that we know will experience disruption, dissolution, disintegration, dismemberment, and death. The inevitability of our ending represents the tragic comedy of life. Much of our needless suffering emanates from resisting our impermanence rather than embracing our fate. Only through acceptance of the events and situations that occur in a person's life including suffering, and by releasing our attachments, will a person ever experience enlightenment. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In a heart that truly loves life grief is always transitory. — Marty Rubin

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display. — Nadeem Aslam

By acknowledging my impermanence, I can consider if there is anything I can do now to help my loved ones who will be left behind cope with losing me and to facilitate healing. — Lisa J. Shultz

The rare opportunity to exist, no matter how brief, is worth the pain left in the wake of its disappearance. — Chris Matakas

I found myself wondering at the impermanence of things. One day, I thought, people will have forgotten any of this happened. This war, these deaths, this demolition. Oh, not for some time, but eventually it will fade. Take its place amongst the layers of the past. Its savagery and horrors replaced in popular imagination by others still to come. — Kate Morton

PROCESS PHILOSOPHY, a school greatly influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, holds that mind and brain are manifestations of a single reality, one that is in constant flux. It thus is compatible with classical Buddhist philosophy, which views clear and penetrating awareness of change and impermanence (anicca in Pali) as the essence of insight. Thus, as Whitehead put it, "The reality is the process," and it is a process made up of vital transient "drops of experience, complex, and interdependent." This view is strikingly consistent with recent developments in quantum physics. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

If nothing lasts then everything has meaning. If everything dies that means we actually live. — Chris Matakas

I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the thing that we hold in memory — Sam Savage

Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality. — Pema Chodron

The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream. — Vera Brittain

To know yourself you must know the transience of your self. — Ilyas Kassam

Impermanence is not something to be afraid of. It's the evolution, a never-ending horizon. — Deepak Chopra

The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity.
The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things.
The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe.
It's part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food.
It's a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses.
It's about winning; about providing society with superior things; and about proving that you have taste, and good values, and you work hard.
And what a wonderful relief, every so often, to know who the enemy is.
Because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time.
And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth, and growth, and beauty, and danger, and triumph.
And then everything dies anyway, right?
But you just keep doing it. — Anne Lamott

What yoga philosophy and all the great Buddhist teachings tells us is that solidity is a creation of the ordinary mind and that there never was anything permanent to begin with that we could hold on to. Life would be much easier and substantially less painful if we lived with the knowledge of impermanence as the only constant. — Donna Farhi

At the heart of all truth lies a radiant cloud of unknowing, a glorious nugget of doubt, a shining core of impermanence. — James K. Morrow

IF YOU WOULD BE FREE OF GREED, FIRST YOU HAVE TO LEAVE EGOTISM BEHIND.
THE BEST MENTAL EXERCISE FOR RELINQUISHING EGOTISM IS CONTEMPLATING IMPERMANENCE. — Dogen

We are all on loan to each other and nothing belongs to us. — Marty Rubin

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praising as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
The emptiness inside you allows you to vibrate
in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost. — Rainer Maria Rilke

That's the hell of sand castles. They are always doomed. That's part of their beauty - their impermanence. — Pamela Moore