Marcus Aurelius Quotes

Everything flows and nothing abides. Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.

Nought may endure but Mutability.

Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted. Matter is in perpetual flux. Change is always and everywhere at work; it strikes through causes and effects, and leaves nothing fixed and permanent.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Thoughts will change and shift just like the wind and the water when you're on the boat; thoughts are no different than anything else.

Everything changes every day.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

Everything isn't permanent, so don't pretend that it is. Everything's supposed to move and shift.

Let's be honest: material comes and goes.

I think everything is temporary.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

Can anything be constant in a world which is eternally changing?

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorageis quicksand.

The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleeting aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.

Nothing is forever except change.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any pointand to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us.

Nothing is permanent but change.

Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are in process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step twice into the same river.

Not one is constant, but everything is changing.

Everything changes and nothing remains still.

Things change that's the way it is.

We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

Nothing is permanent.