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Permanence Quotes

Browse 214 quotes about Permanence.

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Permanence Quotes

“Throughout my days on Earth, I have gone by a myriad of names. I seasonally got wind of epithets such as a rootless strider, a hammer lacking a head, a trampled idealist, and in most instances a hopeless dreamer. And yet: One cannot bring a fantasist back to ground by such utterings. Words for him are like indistinct silhouettes above a sea. Seagulls that disappear into a morning fog. They will erode like statues of stone and abate like the men who built them. A dreamer’s hope can only succumb at the dawn of a more brilliant, precious one.”

DreamHopeImaginationConsciousnessEnlightenmentOnenessDreamerNondualityStatuesPermanence
Book:Journeys Beyond Earth
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“Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to.... How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.”

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Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?”

LifeDeathStonesBonesImmortalityPermanenceTransitory
Book:Jitterbug Perfume
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“What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.”

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Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“Student: Master, today I saw a wonderful house in nature. Master: So, what did you feel? Student: I felt sad because impermanence applies to everything! Master: Fool! Impermanence also has a problem of impermanence, impermanence is also afraid that one day it might turn into permanence, everything will be defeated one day, if only you had thought about such things and lived the beauty of the moment for a while! You fool!”

Mehmet Murat Ildan QuotesImpermanencePermanenceZen StoriesImpermanence Quotes
Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping-bag; the sound of the snow; barely audible, Estraven’s breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death’s solitude. In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth.”

LossGriefDarknessMemorySignificanceWarmthPermanenceCentrality
Book:The Left Hand of Darkness
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“We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth.”

MeanEnoughEarthPastScienceHeavenWaterToo MuchFieldsMaterialsElementsNormalSpringRainRelationForestsProportionMaintainingDewMeadowsPermanencePastures
Book:So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh
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“The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal wave; but, like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It is heard by few, remembered by still fewer, and fades away, like an echo in the mountains, leaving no token of power. It is the written human speech, that gave power and permanence to human thought.”

WritingHumansMayStillsLastsDiesWrittenHeardMountainSpeechLeavingWaveRememberedSandFewerFadesEchoesDiscoursePermanenceFade AwayTokensHuman ThoughtTidal Waves
Author:Albert Pike
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“Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.”

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Book:Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
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“Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?.”

IfsHumansWellsUniverseIndividualHuman BeingsProgressEvolutionFundamentalsSeriesDesirablePermanenceHallmarkFluxAlterationsStasis
Book:Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
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“It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.”

WorldMindChildrenMadeHardFeelingsMightFallStrangeIllusionUnderstoodDown AndConstantHeavyBillionsGrievingZeroGravityOfferingTruth Of LifeBreaking DownFloatsMoleculesDriftingPermanenceLightnessZero Gravity
Author:Lisa Unger
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“Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them—if we want to see it—there is blood, dust, love, curses, and suffering. There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation…and there is a company’s profit curve.”

IfsWayWantTryingHumansUseLife IsDesireSufferingNextEnjoyWaterSpaceCompanyBloodIllusionEmptyBreathsProfitDustHuman LifeCurseAdmirationFragileDiamondCurvesPermanenceSpace BetweenOstentationLife Is FragileMake Someone Happy
Author:Victoria Finlay
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“The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.”

GivingSelfReasonEnergyImaginationBirthSensesSymbolsHarmoniousPermanenceConductorFluxIncorporating
Book:Biographia Literaria, Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
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“Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction.”

IfsFeelsWritingYearsKindBookSelfSometimesGrowsFictionFiveReaderHundredScience FictionCriticsDisappearOur TimeRepeats1960sPermanenceSelf IndulgentSlaughterhousesSlaughterhouse FiveBlather
Author:Michael Dirda
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“Two deep human desires were at war ... the longing for stability, for form, for permanence, which in its essence is the desire for death, and the opposing hunger for movement, change, instability and risk, which are life. Men came from the east and built these American towns because they wished to go no farther, and the towns they built were shaped by the urge to go onward.”

MenHumansTwoWarFormDesireRiskMovementBuiltEssenceTownsLongingHungerEastUrgesStabilityOpposingPermanenceInstability
Book:Old Home Town
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“If men were wise they would see that the affection that God has implanted in us is amply sufficient, when not weakened by artificial aid, to ensure permanence of union; and if they would have more faith in this all would go well. To tie together by human law what God has tied together by passion, is about as wise as it would be to chain the moon to the earth lest the natural attraction existing between them should not be sufficient to prevent them flying asunder.”

IfsMenShouldHumansWellsWould BeEarthTogetherLawPassionNaturalMarriageWiseMoonUnionsAffectionAttractionAidsFlyingChainsTiesSufficientArtificialTiedPermanence
Book:An Autobiography: By Herbert Spencer
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