top of page
"The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a chord or note beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Impermanence quotes

"Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me.Even as I hold youI am letting go."

"If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion."

"Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."

"It is the nature of the circumstances to disperse. If there is attachment with the circumstance, there will be abhorrence when they get dispersed."

"We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward."

"Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."

"Time is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at and who steals what is most precious to men."

"Those who are made can be unmade."

"Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones."

"Money can buy you everything to fill your time but it cannot buy time itself. And things are definitely not time."
Explore more quotes by Alan Watts

"So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing."

"If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly."

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe."

"In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way."

"No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

"In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all."
bottom of page