life on planet earth on Impermanence

I saw a live podcast a few weeks ago, and the host, actor Dax Shepherd, gave the audience a couple minutes to ask questions. One young woman in the front row asked him, “How do you get through the har...

Ilka Chase (1903-1978) was a celebrated American Actress who performed on stage, in television and radio, and several films, including Fast and Loose (1930) and Oceans 11 (the original, in 1960). In h...

George Harrison memorial tree, killed by beetles

Our imagination so powerfully magnifies time, by continual reflections upon it, and so diminishes eternity . . . for want of reflection, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing. ...

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

The three immutable facts: You own stuff. You will die. Someone will get that stuff.

In grief nothing “stays put.”

If identity is fluid, then to remain still is to die—or worse, to become irrelevant—and so we never cease our frantic movement in the direction we hope, and pray, is forward..

Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one.

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Before you long for a life that is imperishable, you must accept that you are perishing along with everyone you care about. You must recognize that anything you might accomplish or acquire in this wor...

A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

For You [God] are infinite and never change. In You, ‘today’ never comes to an end: and yet our ‘today’ does come to an end in You, because time, as well as everything else, exists in You. If it did n...

The meaning of creation remains unexplainable so long as the veil covers the eternal Image. This life would be nothing but destiny, this time only sorrow, all love but decay, if the pulse of Being did...

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...

Death spreads its poison through everything we enjoy because nothing we enjoy is ours to keep. Time passes, things change, and eventually everyone loses everything they love

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys...

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.

Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all...

Life is so constructed that the event does not, cannot, will not match the expectation.

It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become toward the defects of others.

Time, like an ever rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten as a dream Dies at the break of day. The busy tribes of flesh and blood With all their cares and fears, Are carried downw...

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical disguise.

Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of your desire.

Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath. (1897)