Things Not Permanent Quotes & Sayings

I tend to be pessimistic about everything: If things seem to be going good, I'm worried that it's going to end; if things are bad, then I'm worried that it's going to be permanent. It's not a very comfortable attitude to have all the time. — Jesse Eisenberg

I am enormously proud to be an American. I would say that the things that our corporate-controlled government has done at best are shameful and at worst genocidal-but there's an incredible and a permanent culture of resistance in this country that I'm very proud to be a part of. It's not the tradition of slave-owningfounding fathers, it's the tradition of the Frederick Douglasses, the Underground Railroads, the Chief Josephs, the Joe Hills, and the Huey P. Newtons. There's so much to be proud of when you're American that's hidden from you. The incredible courage and bravery of the union organizers in the late 1800's and early 1900's-that's amazing. People of get tricked into going overseas and fighting Uncle Sam's Wall Street wars, but these are people who knew what they were fighting for here at home. I think that that's so much more courageous and brave. — Tom Morello

We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission. We were bent on doing great, permanent noble things. — Harold Nicolson

It is a curious truth and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

The memory of things become the reality of things.
Or maybe the past is not permanent. Maybe the tree has
said its fill, and leaves us with an image of ourselves. — Richard Jackson

Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent
as permanent as the war debts. — Robert H. Jackson

Bonnie persuaded me to focus on the good, just for today: tomorrow I can call back and we will wallow in the total awfulness of Amy's behavior, which will surely lead to permanent estrangement and dead bodies. Just for today, I was supposed to try to remember three things: The baby is not falling off the earth, or headed to Afghanistan. So many things are going well: Everyone has good health. Jax is perfect. Even though I have acid and sewage and grippage in my stomach, which I have had many times before and will have many times again, I can build faith muscles by bearing my feelings of misery and powerlessness - a kind of Nautilus. Rumi said that through love, all pain would turn to medicine. But he never met my family. Or me. — Anne Lamott

Impermanence and non-self are not negative. They are the doors that open to the true nature of reality. They are not the causes of our pain. It is our delusion that causes us to suffer. Regarding something that is impermanent as permanent, holding to something that is without self as having a self, we suffer. Impermanence is the same as non-self. Since phenomena are impermanent, they do not possess a permanent identity. Non-self is also emptiness. Emptiness of what? Empty of a permanent self. Non-self means also interbeing. Because everything is made of everything else, nothing can be by itself alone. Non-self is also interpenetration, because everything contains everything else. Non-self is also interdependence, because this is made of that. Each thing depends on all other things to be. That is interdependence. Nothing can be by itself alone. It has to inter-be with all other things. This is non-self. — Thich Nhat Hanh

She told me it's called the Maka Hanya Haramita Shingyo,69 which means something like the Great Most Excellent Wisdom Heart Sutra. The only part I remember goes like this: Shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki.70 It's pretty abstract. Old Jiko tried to explain it to me, and I don't know if I understood it correctly or not, but I think it means that nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things - including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you - are just kind of flowing through for the time being. — Ruth Ozeki

The only real, true, permanent way to destroy your mind control is to work through the memories. It's unfortunate because it's unpleasant. It hurts to work through your memories; they have pain. Memories are not just made up of ideas, and thoughts and storylines, they are also made up of physical pain and emotional pain and sadness and distress and despair and all of those things are part of memories. — Alison Miller

A process of self-deception to satisfy and summarily persuade yourself of righteousness. What one among us has any excuse but self-love? We do not create or confess a morality that is convenient, that lends itself to growth, and remains simple, that allows transgression without excuse or punishment. It would be wise and commonsense to do so, whatever the state of affairs in your mind. Nature eventually denies that which it affirms: Through permanent association with the same moral code we help desire to transgress. Desire of those things denied, the more you restrict the more you sin, but desire equally desires preservation of moral instinct, so desire is its own conflict (and weakly enough). Have no fear, the Bull of earth has long had nothing to do with your unclean conscience, your stagnant ideas of morality. The microbe alone would seem without fear! — Austin Osman Spare

This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost. — Lauren Oliver

To me, beauty and sadness are very closely linked. Truly beautiful things make me sad because I know they are going to fade. When I see a beautiful 20-year-old boy or girl-and they are breathtaking-I am filled with a kind of sadness. But maybe they are beautiful because we know they are not permanent and they are in a kind of transition. — Tom Ford

You seem to be absolutely unaware of the phenomenon of marriage - which is destructive to both man and woman. Love is creative, marriage is destructive. But love is not dependable: this moment it may be there and the next moment gone. And man wants permanent things; he is obsessed with permanent things. He wants security, safety, he wants to cling. Hence love is not reliable, so he created marriage. — Rajneesh

Everything lasts forever," Ava said quietly as though she were making the statement to herself rather than to her father. "Older people always think that things like this can't last. But that's not the way it is anymore. Things can last forever and ever now because of the internet. Everything is saved somewhere. Everything is permanent. Nothing dies anymore." "That's...insightful, — Jason Mott

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know a few universals like: he who can destroy a thing controls it. Not that I get off on destroying things but when you get backed against a wall, coming out with both guns blazing is pretty much your only choice. I want enough power to void a contract, enough to quit my job, permanent-like. — Karen Marie Moning

Any rule, not existing in the nature of things, or that is not permanent, universal and inflexible in its application, is no law, according to any correct definition of the term law. — Lysander Spooner

These are the things we do sometimes, she thinks. We remind ourselves of why we're in love, so that we can stay that way. It's not a permanent state, remember that, she tells herself. — Jami Attenberg

I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with other or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else
but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt. — Richard Ford

I have been writing my whole life: stories and plays and sketches and scripts and poems and jokes. Most feel alive. And fluid. Breathing organisms made better by the people who come into contact with them. But this book has nearly killed me. Because, you see, a book? A book has a cover. They call it a jacket and that jacket keeps the inside warm so that the words stay permanent and everyone can read your genius thoughts over and over again for years to come. Once a book is published it can't be changed, which is a stressful proposition for this improviser who relies on her charm. I've been told that I am "better in the room" and "prettier in person." Both these things are not helpful when writing a book. I am looking forward to a lively book-on-tape session with the hope that Kathleen Turner agrees to play me when I talk about some of my darker periods. One can dream. — Amy Poehler

As we've seen, there are only two tasks involved - discarding and deciding where to keep things. Just two, but discarding must come first. Be sure to completely finish the first task before starting the next. Do not even think of putting your things away until you have finished the process of discarding. Failure to follow this order is one reason many people never make permanent progress. In the middle of discarding, they start thinking about where to put things. As soon as they think, "I wonder if it will fit in this drawer," the work of discarding comes to a halt. You can think about where to put things when you've finished getting rid of everything you don't need. — Marie Kondo

We participate, without feeling it's significance, to a battle of the free life against the profitable agony.
This battle is not lead the way military do. It never expects neither victory nor defeat, it does not rely on tactics, it mobilizes nor brute force nor the ruse. It is not based on any project, nor any action plan.
It is a battle on between a decay of all things, a weariness of the people that convinced them to die, and the permanent revival of a life that will never give up, permanently claims rights, and progresses through its quiet determination to ignore the obstacles. — Raoul Vaneigem

God never gives dominion to any creature which has not received his image. His image is love. Other things belong to God; but God is love. No creature that has not love will be allowed to have a permanent empire. The Father of mercy will not put the reigns of government into a hand that has no heart. Dominion is a very solemn thing; it may oppress, crush, destroy. The Father must have a guarantee for its gentleness. What guarantee can there be but his image - the possession of a nature tender as the Divine? — George Matheson

Or was the "something" that had changed ... me? There comes a moment in every relationship when taking up permanent residence in the gray area between what is and what isn't is no longer enough. When the need for clarity surpasses the need to make things work. When you start to realize that the constant limbo of an undefined relationship isn't as fun as it was when the music first started. When you have to seek your own closure, because the other person cannot or will not give it to you. — Mandy Hale

Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn't rely on it, because it's not guaranteed and it's not permanent and it's not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing - the characters, the story, the words, the themes - and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don't warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don't fall apart. — Veronica Roth

Let us treasure up in our soul some of those things which are permanent ... , not of those which will forsake us and be destroyed, and which only tickle our senses for a little while ... — Gregory Of Nazianzus

When children feel comfortable asking for help, they know they matter. They see that others care and want to be there for them. They understand that they are not alone and can gain some control by reaching out for support. They realize that pain is not permanent; things can get better. — Sheryl Sandberg

People with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. — David Brooks

Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens ... inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case. In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on 'inventin'
that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was 'that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.' This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought. — Anthony Everitt

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

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You do not suffer because things are impermanent. You suffer because things are impermanent and you think they are permanent. — Nhat Hanh

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote. — Samuel Johnson

But the Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state. — H.G.Wells

For one, we very much need in any immigration bill - we need protection for people who are in this country and who have not become citizens, for example, that they are protected and legitimized and given permanent residency here. And we want to see some things of that kind added to the immigration bill. — Ronald Reagan

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men. — George Orwell

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. — T. S. Eliot

And even if she loses the charms, she thinks, they'll always be a part of her. The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. People get tattoos to have a permanent reminder of things they love or believe or fear, but though she'll never regret the turtle, she has no need to ink her flesh again to remember the past. She had not known the markings would be etched so deep. A — Christina Baker Kline

I pity those who make much ado about the transitory nature of all things and are lost in the contemplation of earthly vanity: are we not here to make the transitory permanent? This we can do only if we know how to value both. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life- some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was all part of something that would live on. But I had also come to recognize that not everything needs to be durable. the lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or future is not limiting but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him, it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient. — Susan Orlean

All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time...Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which "the town was illuminated." There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated...The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary...It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater...Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness. — G.K. Chesterton

There is no one who has no leisure time at all. The office is not a permanent sanctuary, and Sundays are an institution. Thus, in principle, during those beautiful hours of free time everyone would have the opportunity to rouse himself into real boredom. But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn't interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves. — Siegfried Kracauer

Things that seem permanent, a given, have a way of changing quickly, to something you don't recognize. And not all change is for the better. — John Jackson Miller

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face.The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.
The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hours I would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been, could I have lived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden in summer, and the birds that sang at dawn.Tea under the chestnut tree, and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns below.
I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved.They were memories that cannot hurt. — Daphne Du Maurier

She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the pleasing features unfirm, as if they still had to settle into some sort of permanent expression. Nicknamed after a nursery rhyme, she had yet to shed a childhood endearment. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Will it not be wise to allow the friendship between nations to rest upon deep and permanent things? Irritations of the cuticle must not be confounded with heart failure. — Benjamin Harrison

People tend to forget they are patients. Once they leave the doctor's office or the hospital, they simply put it out of their minds. But you are all permanent patients, like it or not. I am the doctor, you the patient. Doctor doesn't cease being doctor at close of day. Neither should patient. People expect doctor to go about things with the utmost seriousness, skill and experience. But what about patient? How professional is he? — Don DeLillo

There are some who do not learn, and who do not improve as fast as they might, because their eyes and their hearts are not upon God; they do not reflect neither do they have that knowledge which they might have; they miss a good deal which they might receive. We have got to obtain knowledge before we obtain permanent happiness; we have got to be wide awake in the things of God. — Lorenzo Snow

That's one reason wildlife films matter: they're a set of permanent memories we can all share, making real those things we have not seen for ourselves, such as the plight of the albatrosses. In time perhaps this will make us wiser about protecting what we still have, by making it harder for anyone to say, 'I didn't know. — John Aitchison

Change is the very nature of Nature. if there's one thing that doesn't change, it is the fact that everything changes. In the Korean tradition of Tao, this is called impermanence. The teaching about impermanence can be summarized like this: Anything that has a beginning must have an end. Anything that is created will change. Impermanence is the very nature of things. Realizing that nothing is permanent is the true beginning of enlightenment. Suffering comes from attachment that wants to hold something permanently that is not permanent in its intrinsic nature. Awakening to the truth of impermanence frees you from attachment. — Ilchi Lee

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today - it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence. — Roy Scranton

Man may not be the colossus some secular spirits would have him be, armed with the strength and wisdom of the gods, but he has partaken of ambrosia. He has squinted trough the veil and seen just enough of divinity to measure himself by it. The Humanist knows both the strengths and the frailties of man. He strives. But he knows the bounds of his striving.......

Visions and ideals need a path, a way, a roadmap people can use as to arrive at those better, more permanent things that the wise are always seeing dimly whenever they strained their eyes. So man turned a mirror on himself, looked soberly, and-one day-began to write accounts of the discoveries made on the grandest odyssey of them all: the journey to the core of the human mind and soul. The grateful among us read them. — Tracy Lee Simmons

A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it. Obviously. It was designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want. — Douglas Adams

There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through. — Roger Deakin

Change may be the vitalizing wind blowing through the house of life, but it is not an abiding force. We need permanent things to soak peace into us as well as progress - the beauty of the earth, seedtime and harvest, the smiles of lovers, the joy of the young in being alive, pride in craftsmanship. Why, oh why must we let ourselves forget these lasting treasures in an age of consuming ambition, speed madness and accumulated goods that leave us no chance to live? If we cannot be contented with a little no wealth will ever satisfy us. — Helen Keller