74 Impermanence Quotes

This is serious: some of the things that are supposed to last the rest of my life are already wearing out.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

If you want to have life, you have to die every moment for it. Life and death are only different expressions of the same thing looked at from different standpoints; they are the falling and the rising of the same wave, and the two form one whole.

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.

All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die, And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.

Don't let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain.

But high up on the mountain When the wind is hitting it If you're watching very closely The rock slips a little bit...

It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now - girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.

Strive to preserve your heart in peace; let no event of this world disturb it; reflect that all must come to an end.

Life and death, union and separation, follow hard upon one another. Nothing is steadfast but the will, nothing endures but one's achieve-ments. These alone count in life.

I understand his longing for immortality : Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.

Behold now, Bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to decay. Strive with diligence!

Think'st thou existence doth depend on time? It doth; but actions are our epochs: mine Have made my days and nights imperishable Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore Innumerable atoms; and one desert Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break, But nothing rests, save carcases and wrecks, Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness.

We rest. - A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. - One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: It is the same! - For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things. Human life, with all its unreal ills and transitory hopes, is as a dream, which departs before the dawn, leaving no trace of its evanescent lines.

Fair daffadills, we weep to see You haste away so soon: As yet the early rising sun Has not attained his noon.

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. ~ 45

Castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually

Things die. All things die.

Tomorrow, I shall no longer be here.

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

I met her in a Kingstown bar. We fell in love, I knew it had to end. We took what we had and we ripped it apart. Now here I am down in Kingstown again.

Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain. Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water. And soon the pond must freeze.

But Argos can do without the house of Atreus. Ancient houses are not eternal.

Nythod ddwyn, cyd nithud ddail, Ni'th dditia neb, ni'th etail, Na llu rhugl, na llaw rhaglaw, Na llafn glas na llif na glaw.

Yet Dafydd's humour does not obscure, any more than Chaucer's does, the underlying seriousness of his poetry. Behind his poems of requited and unrequited love, whether idyllic or idealizing, whether streaked by savage jealousy or a profound feeling of betrayal reminiscent of Troilus and Criseyde, there runs a sense of the cruel impermanence of the world.

Now while we speak, the sun speeds forth: can I Or thou assure him of his goal? God's breath Even at this moment haply quickeneth The air to a flame; till spirits, always nigh Though screen'd and hid, shall walk the daylight here.

What is this world of ours? A complex entity subject to sudden changes which all indicate a tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings which follow one another, assert themselves and disappear; a fleeting symmetry; a momentary order.

The Gods sell when they give. / Glory is paid for with disgrace. / Poor are the happy, for they are / Just what passes.

Sunrise doesn't last all morning, a cloudburst doesn't last all day, seems my love is up and has left you with no warning. It's not always going to be this grey. All things must pass, all things must pass away.

Oaks shall be rent; the Word shall shatter - Yea, on that fiery day, the Crown, Even the palace walls shall totter, And domes and spires come crashing down.

What doesn't hurt - is not life; what doesn't pass - is not happiness.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

On the harp of the road what true melodies are being sounded! and its notes pierce the heart: There the Eternal Fountain is playing its endless life-streams of birth and death.

The sad vicissitude of things.

And here you are hurried, And here you are gone; And here is the love, That it's all built upon.

Love and flowers do not last but one spring.

I have loved flowers that fade, Within whose magic tents Rich hues have marriage made With sweet unmemoried scents: A honeymoon delight, A joy of love at sight, That ages in an hour My song be like a flower!

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

Wistaria sprays, as they trail in the breeze, suggest softness, gentleness, reticence. Disappearing and then appearing again in the early summer greenery, they have in them that feeling for the poignant beauty of things long characterized by the Japanese as mono no aware.

Nothing lasts.