Impermanence Quotes

It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

~ Heraclitus

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

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

~ David Foster Wallace

Many have died, you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain.

~ Kabir

That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)

~ Stephen Levine

...nothing wonderful lasted forever. Joy was as fleeting as a shooting star that crossed the evening sky, ready to blink out at any moment.

~ Nicholas Sparks

Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.

~ Zeena Schreck

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

~ Alan W. Watts

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

Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What’s more, we’re encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Do not compromise yourself and put your goodness in the same impermanent category as whatever circumstance happening. Be the best you in every circumstance.

~ Steve Maraboli

Nothing endures but change.

~ Heraclitus

A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

We need to cease allowing the past to define us. We are evolving as a human race, and just because war and aggressive competition has always been a part of our heritage, that doesn’t mean we are forever destined to war and engage in aggressive competition.We are moving forward to a time when the heart will guide us. We once had to fight to survive, and some still do. Yet now it is time to lay down our weapons and open our hearts to the expansive potential of human compassion and creativity.Where our attention goes, energy flows. Do we continue to focus on opposition and give it our energy? Or do we begin to focus our energy on our own authentic freedom to shine and help to illuminate the world? The choice is ours.There are no mistakes – you are exactly where you need to be, and you were born with the precise gifts needed to transform a dying world into a thriving planet.

~ Alaric Hutchinson

There is no the way things are. Every day is different, and you live it differently.

~ Marty Rubin

If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I'd be glad, but all the same I'd look at it with a colder eye. I'd say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn't have to be today.

~ Hermann Hesse

Why are the desert blooms that spring to life after a monsoon so magnificent? The answer is – their impermanence. The lush growth and blooming flowers do not last very long here in the desert, and this new growth only happens once a year. If this growth was never-ending, we would soon take it for granted. Likewise, our human lives. What makes them so special and unique? Our fleeting impermanence.

~ Alaric Hutchinson

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

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.

~ Robert Frost

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

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

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

~ Gregory Maguire

You may be anybody now. One day, you will be just a faded memory.

~ Aditya Ajmera

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Most days, I’ve got this impermanence thing down just great. It doesn’t bother me; what’s to bother? Most days, I sit comfortably with the knowledge that I’ll die alone, and I feel nothing so strongly as my embrace of my nothingness. Most days don’t really matter, because there is only this day, and right now I feel like fear is all I am. I don’t want you to leave. Just let me pretend you won’t.'He wrapped his arms around me and we slept. For that night, we would last forever.

~ Agnostic Zetetic

Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven't realized that todayis tomorrow's nostalgia.

~ Zeena Schreck

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

. . .our whispered words, faintly in the darkness, dissolvingwithin the trees—then, fleeting words of consolationwould not suffice if feigned, and flippant wordsconfessed reluctance—our wordswere meaningless uttered on the wind. . .

~ John Daniel Thieme

And suddenly you realize: you are in every dot of the universe vanishing and arising.

~ Amit Ray

The lights became stars, which became streaks in the grayspace, and then networks of fading shimmers

~ Ashim Shanker

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

~ Paulo Coelho

Trees, O trees, why can't you hold on to your leaves?

~ Marty Rubin

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

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

~ Chris Matakas

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

We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come in contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation and grief, because eventually we are separated from everything and everyone we love. Our lack of acceptance and understanding of this fact makes life unsatisfactory.

~ Noah Levine

that was bad; i shouldn't have done thatto prevent you from entering a catatonic statei am going to maintain a calm facial expressionwith crinkly eyes and an overall friendly demeanori believe in a human being that is not upseti believe if you are working i should not be insaneor upset--why am i ever insane or upset and not working?i vacuumed the entire house this morningi cleaned the kitchen and the computer roomand i made you a meat helmet with computer paperthe opportunity for change exists in each moment, all moments are aloneand separate from other moments, and there are a limited number of momentsand the idea of change is a delusion of positive or negative thinkingyour hands are covering your faceand your body moves like a statuewhen i try to manipulate an appendageif i could just get you to cry tears of joy one more time

~ Tao Lin

Eventually everything appears to disappear from the life. That's it.

~ Aditya Ajmera

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