Quotes about Impermanence

The frailty of everything revealed at last.

She was not herself--she was not anything. She was something that is going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature

Don't wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow may be too late. If we know how to live according the insight of impermanence, we will not make many mistakes. We can be happy right now. We can love our beloved, care for her, and make her happy today. And we won't run toward the future, losing our life, which is available only in the present moment.

The truth is, when we burn the paper, it will change into something else and will continue on in other forms—as ash, smoke, and heat, in our body and the universe. The heat is one of the next lives of the paper, as is the smoke rising to the sky. The ash will return to the earth and become part of the soil. So the sheet of paper, in its next life, might be a cloud and a rose at the same time.

If the human species has been able to make any progress, it is because of our heart of love and compassion. We need to learn from compassionate beings how to develop the practice of deep observation for the sake of others. Then others will be able to learn from us the way to live in the present and see the impermanent and selfless nature of all that is. This insight will lighten suffering.

According to our narrow view of a truly existing self, life is just my body, my house, my spouse, my children, and my riches. But if we can extend beyond every limit we have created for ourselves, we will see that our life exists in everything, and that the deterioration of phenomena cannot touch that life, just as the arising and disappearing of the waves cannot influence the being of the water.

There is change in all things. You yourself are subject to continual change and some decay, and this is common to the entire universe.

O how quickly passes away the glory of the earth.

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon,' wrote Ashvhaghosha almost two thousand years ago, 'then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world.