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Updated: June 29, 2025
In its origin the Buddha's celebrated doctrine that there is no permanent self in persons or things is not a speculative proposition, nor a sentimental lament over the transitoriness of the world, but a basis for religion and morals. You will never be happy unless you realize that you can make and remake your own soul.
In epochs of expansion, epochs such as that in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is again heard: Now is the judgment of this world in such epochs aristocracies, with their natural clinging to the established fact, their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable transitoriness of all human institutions, are bewildered and helpless.
There was nothing else that my visit enabled me to see particularly deserving of being recorded; but, when I was told that it was in this Citadel that the ancient Emperors of Germany used oftentimes to reside, and make carousal, and when I saw, now, scarcely anything but dark passages, unfurnished galleries, naked halls, and untenanted chambers I own that I could hardly refrain from uttering a sigh over the mutability of earthly fashions, and the transitoriness of worldly grandeur.
There is such a one dead, such a one is departed; it is because they do so little consider both the transitoriness of themselves and their neighbours. And as I said before, that not only the wicked, but also the godly have their time to depart this life. And the beggar died.
Life is of little value to the possessor, they say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is constantly being thrust upon us. And that is so in India. Great rivers keep repeating their contemptuous motto that "men may come and men may go," and by their floods sometimes devastate whole districts.
The different experiences of such or such a life in particular have become extended and confounded in the universal idea of transitoriness, and the bard, deeply moved, pursued by the increase of ruin everywhere present, takes his flight towards heaven, to find there in the course of the sun an emblem of what does not pass away. I turn now to the elegiac poets of modern times.
The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.
"All these thoughts of the transitoriness, the insignificance and the aimlessness of life, of the inevitability of death, of the shadows of the grave, and so on, all such lofty thoughts, I tell you, my dear fellow, are good and natural in old age when they come as the product of years of inner travail, and are won by suffering and really are intellectual riches; for a youthful brain on the threshold of real life they are simply a calamity!
We, scholars of modern thought, have the broader, and therefore more solemn and obligatory knowledge, that however many to-morrows may come, and whatever fate they may bring, we never die; that, strictly speaking, no one yet who has lived has ever died; that for good or for evil our every change from potentiality into motion is carried on beyond our own apparent transitoriness; that we are the waves of the ocean of life, communicating motion to the expanse before us, and leaving the history we have made on the shore behind.
"The sea contains the purest and impurest water, drinkable and wholesome for fishes, it is undrinkable and injurious to human beings." Here Heraclitus is not primarily drawing attention to the transitoriness of earthly things, but to the splendour and majesty of the eternal. Heraclitus speaks vehemently against Homer and Hesiod, and the learned men of his day.
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