Permanence Quotes

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives

But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

Ernest Hemingway

I promise permanence. I promise persistence. I promise that falling in love was just the beginning for us.

Didn't anyone ever teach you that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission?

No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor -- to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades -- even centuries -- will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.

I believe in the brief eternity of the rose.

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.

Thornton Wilder

I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life- some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was all part of something that would live on. But I had also come to recognize that not everything needs to be durable. the lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or future is not limiting but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him, it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient.

Stone should last forever, but on that night I came to understand that a stone was only another form of dust. Streams of holy dust loomed in the air, and every breath included remnants of the Temple, so that we inhaled that which was meant to stand through eternity.

I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...

Sometimes it takes a miracle to remind us that the only permanent condition is that of impermanence.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Etchings endure, But not in SandMeanings Collide To Unresolved FragmentsCodes fizzle to StaticThey are not lostBut UnheardNever lostFading slowly to SilenceBy infinite degrees

To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I’ve effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I’ve actually imprinted it in indelible ink.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

People tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

Viktor E. Frankl

But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.

Jonathan Safran Foer

For, dear me, why abandon a beliefMerely because it ceases to be true?Cling to it long enough, and not a doubtIt will turn true again, for so it goes.Most of the change we think we see in lifeIs due to truths being in and out of favor.As I sit here, and often times, I wishI could be monarch of a desert landI could devote and dedicate foreverTo the truths we keep coming back and back to.––from "The Black Cottage

I have a thing for things that last.

After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy.

Your love is as stable as you are: It's not about how good a person makes you feel, but rather what good you can do for them.

Writing has the power of permanence.

Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).

Georges Bataille

Had the love been permanent, there won’t have been divorces after love marriages. Had the love been everlasting, there won’t have been bad blood in the family.

Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.

Timothy J. Keller

Love is misunderstood by many. Love is to be in the state of calmness even when everything is getting destroyed of you & around you. Love is to be Permanent in the law of impermanence.

Chetan M. Kumbhar

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.

Alain de Botton

Sit here, so I may writeyou into a poem and make you eternal.

Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach.

Change is the rule. Permanence is an illusion.

Debasish Mridha

Unlike wealth, there is an infinite value in legacy.

You are sorrow. You exist, even if joy is present. You’re not like them. You’re not like any other emotion. Hate and fear come and go, but you exist even when the breeze is clear of sadness. You are permanent and needed.

H.S. Crow

Don’t make your job your permanent assignment. Rather, make your work your permanent assignment

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

Don’t make your job your permanent assignment. Rather, make your work your permanent assignment

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

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.

Alberto Savinio

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.

Alain de Botton

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

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?

Momentary happiness is worse than permanent misery.

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

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

Bertrand Russell

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