Quotes About Impermanence

#1. Whenever ego suffers from fear of death & your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche

#2. Entrepreneurs need to recognize that, especially in the digital domain, they are unlikely to come up with something that is going to be permanently on top, that impermanence and ephemerality is the nature of the beast.

Jamais Cascio

#3. as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears. My ties to the people around me were also marked by those two modes of impermanence: breaking up or disappearing.

Valeria Luiselli

#4. 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

#5. Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

Richard Rohr

#6. Love is misunderstood by many.
Love is to be in the state of calmness even when everything is getting destroyed of you & around you.
Love is to be Permanent in the law of impermanence.

Chetan M. Kumbhar

#7. 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

#8. Realizing that I can't control or change the impermanence of things in human life is daunting.

Michael Beckwith

#9. 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

#10. The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.

Helen Craig McCullough

#11. And here's a secret for you - everything beautiful is sad ... gilded with impermanence ...

John Geddes

#12. In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process.

Rachel Naomi Remen

#13. There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict.

U.G. Krishnamurti

#14. 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

#15. And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.

Michael Chabon

#16. The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Ellen Glasgow

#17. Some people, sweet and attractive, and strong and healthy, happen to die young. They are masters in disguise teaching us about impermanence.

Dalai Lama

#18. IMPERMANENCE
Driftsand of the hours. Quietly disappearing,
continuously, even the happily consecrated design.
Life blows away, always: pillars already rise
without connection, carrying nothing but empty air.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#19. Impermanence means that everything changes and that nothing remains the same in any consecutive moments. And although things change every moment, they still cannot be accurately described as the same or as different from what they were a moment ago.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

Pema Chodron

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Breathe and you dwell in the here and now, breath and you see impermanence is life.

Nhat Hanh

#26. 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

#27. Impermanence is the very essence of joy-the drop of bitterness that enables one to perceive the sweet.

Myrtle Reed

#28. 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

#29. Daily life provides countless occasions for adapting to change and impermanence. Yet we squander these precious opportunities, assuming that we have all the time in the world.

Yongey Mingyur

#30. 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.

Sogyal Rinpoche

#31. The most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.

Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness.

Peter Heller

#32. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

Gaston Bachelard

#33. It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence.

Gerald Vizenor

#34. One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.

Dogen

#35. In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.

Joanna Macy

#36. In the face of impermanence, if your next thought is good, this is what we call the realization body.

Bill Porter

#37. 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

#38. When you truly embrace your human impermanence you connect with the power you have, and influence you have, over the time you have.

Steve Maraboli

#39. Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels.

Jack Kornfield

#40. Spirits didn't notice death. By the rule of impermanence, what was meant to break simply broke, and there was only the next breaking and the next.

E.J. Koh

#41. Part of the problem of the city is the impermanence of success. We're only as good as our last deal,

Derek L. Worthington

#42. Sometimes it takes a miracle to remind us that the only permanent condition is that of impermanence.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

#43. What is the happiness ? Is it really happiness ? Nothing stable, just happen, stay and decay ... Everything is impermanence, dissatisfaction and nothing can ever belong to itself

Gautama Buddha

#44. The knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Pema Chodron

#46. As in intellectual error, so in evil of any other form, its essence is impermanence, for it cannot accord with the whole. Every moment it is being corrected by the totality of things and keeps changing its aspect.

Rabindranath Tagore

#47. Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

Jonathan Tropper

#48. Mortal lives are not stones. They are not seas. For impermanence to judge itself by the standards of permanence is folly. Or it is arrogance. Life merely is what it is, neither more nor less. To deem it less because it is not more is to heed the counsels of the Despiser.

Stephen R. Donaldson

#49. How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence ...
p 259

Rachel Naomi Remen

#50. 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

#51. You'll forget your inner peace, forget that it comes from impermanence. From knowing that everything will break. And only reason can right you.

E.J. Koh

#52. 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

#53. [S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.

Joan Silber

#54. Life is miraculous, even in its suffering. Without suffering, life would not be possible. There is nothing permanent, and there is no separate self. Neither is there impermanence or no-self. When we see life deeply, there is no death. Therefore, it isn't necessary to say everlasting life.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#55. 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

#56. Healing and positive life change comes from having the courage and spiritual conviction to look squarely at life's impermanence.

Meredith L. Young-Sowers

#57. The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.

Jenny Offill

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?

Rainer Maria Rilke

#61. For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

Adam Nicolson

#62. That's the hell of sand castles. They are always doomed. That's part of their beauty - their impermanence.

Pamela Moore

#63. Nothing in the world is permanent. The only permanent thing is impermanence.

Lisa See

#64. In the impermanence of life, it was impossible to accept the foreverness of death.

Martine Murray

#65. Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them. In fact, real peace and joy are only possible when we see clearly into the nature of impermanence.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#66. Suffering is described in terms of three characteristics of impermanence or transitory nature, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness.

Dalai Lama XIV

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. Impermanence is very important, crucial for life. That is why instead of complaining about impermanence you have to say "Long live impermanence!"

Nhat Hanh

#70. Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. The whole city gives you the impression of impermanence. You have the feeling that one day someone is going to yell, "Cut! Strike it!" and then the stagehands will scurry out and remove the mountains, the movie-star homes, the Hollywood Bowl
everything.

Allan Sherman

#74. 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

#75. Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

Gregory Maguire

#76. To feel sabi is to feel keenly one's own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did "infinity in the palm of your hand" - to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast.

Jane Hirshfield

#77. 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

#78. By identifying impermanence as a fundamental characteristic of existence itself, rather than a problem to be solved, the Buddhists are encouraging us to let go our hold on illusory solidity and learn to swim freely in the sea of change.

Andrew Olendzki

#79. The notion is called wabi-sabi life, like the cherry blossom, it is beautiful because of its impermanence, not in spite of it, more exquisite for the inevitability of loss.

Peggy Orenstein

#80. The only permanent aspect of creation is constant impermanence.

Chris Matakas

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

Deepak Chopra

#82. TURNING YOUR MIND toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness.

Pema Chodron

#83. 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]

Sylvia Boorstein

#84. Leaving the people and places you love, is a reminder of the impermanence of this life. And the permanence of the next.

Yasmin Mogahed

#85. 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

#86. I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it ... forever. Or at least I'm going to try.'

Jason Silva

#87. 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

#88. We are often sad and suffer a lot when things change, but change and impermanence have a positive side. Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible ... If your daughter is not impermanent, she cannot grow up to become a woman. Then your grandchildren would never manifest.

Nhat Hanh

#89. Impermanence is the law of the universe.

Carlene Hatcher Polite

#90. These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.

Pessoa, Fernando

#91. They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

Peter S. Beagle

#92. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Alan W. Watts

#93. The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

Annie Dillard

#94. What fades, vanishes, decays, dies-that's what one must love.

Marty Rubin

#95. 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

#96. Nothing endures but change.

Heraclitus

#97. We are all on loan to each other and nothing belongs to us.

Marty Rubin

#98. Even very great things, he meant, can't last forever. Or beautiful things, I suppose. Those too. Things that don't really need replacing except because they fall apart.

Emma Richler

#99. Any wave of the ocean could be my epitaph.

Marty Rubin

#100. To know yourself you must know the transience of your self.

Ilyas Kassam