Acceptance of Impermanence Quotes

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

To renounce things is not to give them up. It is to acknowledge that all things go away.

We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good. We don’t want to be wrong because then we’ll feel bad. But we could be more compassionate toward all these parts of ourselves. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent, and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death. The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Don't get attached to anything.

If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever.

You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time.

I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever. The ever after, what precisely was that? Your dreams, your life, your death, your everything. Was it the blank space that went on without us? The forever after we were gone?

I think the key is to realize that life is temporary and spending life questioning life is a waste of time.

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.

If I hadn't learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We'd seen what we'd come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upwards, black and blue into the even bluer sky.

The basic rules of life would indicate that it can't last forever, and we'll fall off of the wave and have to climb onto another, but I don't think about it too much. We just keep moving.

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren't afraid of dying, there is nothing you can't achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place. When you handle the master carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand.

I resent the creation of a world in which beauty is a reminder of what we're losing rather than a celebration of what we have.

When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment

My understanding is that to love, we need to be able to totally surrender to the living/dying nature of this world.

Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.

Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it. At seventy, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that 'this, too, shall pass!'

Wisdom can see the red, the rose, the stained and sculptured curve of grey, the charcoal scars of fire, and see around that living tower of tree the hermit tatters of old bark split down and strip to end the season; and can be quiet and not look for reasons past the edge of reason.

My test for veracity has always been: How this will settle with a person who is dying? Boundlessness seemed to me to open the door to the true nature of mind that is pointed to in the Heart Sutra.

Renunciation is submission to time.

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?