Impermanence Quotes - Page 4

• If we lived forever, if the dews of Adashino never vanished, if the crematory smoke on Toribeyama never faded, men would hardly feel the pity of things. The beauty of life is in its impermanence. Man lives the longest of all living things... and even one year lived peacefully seems very long. Yet for such as love the world, a thousand years would fade like the dream of one night.

  Yoshida Kenko

  Dream, Night, Men

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• For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

  Susan Sontag

  Death, Religious, Dying

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• Finally, 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

  Loss, Appetite For Life, Despair

  Gretel Ehrlich (1986). “The Solace of Open Spaces”, Penguin Group USA

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• I just think that the reality of life is impermanence. That's the foundation of understanding what Yoga is, and we're here for however long we're here, and then it's over. And I've known this since I was a kid.

  Gary Kraftsow

  Yoga, Kids, Reality

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• Come my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession.

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Gentleman, Dying

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 5, sc. 1, l. [32]

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• Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.

  George Meredith

  Death, Nature, Garden

  George Meredith (1862). “Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside: With Poems and Ballads”, p.203

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• It is good to have a reminder of death before us, for it helps us to understand the impermanence of life on this earth, and this understanding may aid us in preparing for our own death. He who is well prepared is he who knows that he is nothing compared with Wakan-Tanka, who is everything; then he knows that world which is real.

  Black Elk

  Death, Real, Understanding

  "The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux". Book by Black Elk and Joseph Epes Brown, 1953.

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• Old gardeners never die. They just spade away and then throw in the trowel.

  Herbert V. Prochnow

  Death, Garden, Justice

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• I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

  Emile Zola

  Death, Passion, Garden

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• Through winter-time we call on spring,
  And through the spring on summer call,
  And when the abounding hedges ring
  Declare that winter's best of all:
  And after that there's nothing good
  Because the spring time has not come-
  Not know that what disturbs our blood
  Is but its longing for the tomb.

  William Butler Yeats

  Death, Summer, Spring

  William Butler Yeats (2012). “The Tower: A Facsimile Edition”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• On to the Next Dream became about much more than me facing a challenging situation; it became about how all of us feel when we're thrust unexpectedly into change. It's about how we all hold onto personalized visions of our lives, our city, and our culture, and what we do when reality forces us to confront the impermanence of those visions.

  Paul Madonna

  Dream, Reality, Challenges

  Source: therumpus.net

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• You find a flower half-buried in leaves,
  And in your eye its very fate resides.
  Loving beauty, you caress the bloom;
  Soon enough, you'll sweep petals from the floor.
  Terrible to love the lovely so,
  To count your own years, to say I'm old,
  To see a flower half-buried in leaves
  And come face to face with what you are.

  Hanshan

  Death, Flower, Eye

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• 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

  Funny, Stars, Home

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• In the long run we are all dead.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Funny, Death, Running

  A Tract on Monetary Reform ch. 3 (1923)

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• Fear no more the heat o' th' sun Nor the furious winters' rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

  William Shakespeare

  Girl, Death, Art

  'Cymbeline' (1609-10) act 4, sc. 2, l. 258

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• In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

  May Sarton

  Death, Flower, Creativity

  May Sarton, Edith Royce Schade (1994). “From May Sarton's well: writings of May Sarton”, Papier Mache Pr

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• Take the goods the gods provide, and don't stand and sulk when they are snatched away.

  Mary McMullen

  Death, Dying, God Provides

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• Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.

  Andre Maurois

  Death, Fear, Men

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

  Thomas Mann

  Love, Death, Men

  Halldór Laxness, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann (1971). “Halldór Laxness, Maurice Maeterlinck [and] Thomas Mann”

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• Planting is one of my great amusements, and even of those things which can only be for posterity, for a Septuagenary has no right to count on any thing but annuals.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Death, Dying, Amusement

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

  Gregory Maguire

  Needs, Temporary, Discredit

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• Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.

  Henry Mitchell

  Death, Garden, Dying

  Henry Mitchell (2003). “The Essential Earthman: Henry Mitchell on Gardening”, p.2, Indiana University Press

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• Our blessed Savior chose the Garden for his Oratory, and dying, for the place of his Sepulchre; and we do avouch for many weighty causes, that there are none more fit to bury our dead in than in our Gardens and Groves, where our Beds may be decked with verdant and fragrant flowers, Trees and Perennial Plants, the most natural and instructive Hieroglyphics of our expected Resurrection and Immortality.

  John Evelyn

  Death, Flower, Blessed

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• Pity! The southerly trees have shed their leaves. Nobody comes to appreciate the mountain's beauty. Tomorrow I too will float away. My reflection gone from cool streams.

  Cheng Man-ch'ing

  Beauty, Death, Appreciation

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• There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
  And, with his sickle keen,
  He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
  And the flowers that grow between.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Death, Flower, Names

  "The Reaper and the Flowers" st. 1 (1839)

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