Quotes Tagged "permanence"

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)

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?

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.

The idea that all souls are mortal is the only notion surely terminating love and all its forms.

Mr. Codro's destiny is Ptolemaic; in other words, based on fiction. Ptolemaic says it all; it means above all fixed and unchanging, that is to say different from real life which is by nature changing and temporary. It means: not according to natural truth, but according to man's desire and the pretense inspired by his fear of dying and his desire for permanence.

Everything is new and doomed.

A job shouldn’t be a mean of existence but rather, a means of sustenance

What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Something I learned when I got older; your actions have a permanence. Delineations from the perfect line. Some mistakes can last a lifetime like the first brush of death. Some beliefs are worth tearing fabric for like perfect lines. It does not matter where a person has been but what they have done. There are people that can still be shallow no matter how much they travel or what they see.

They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumbles away, computers could be destroyed. Only the spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn't a thing.