It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not. We need to learn to appreciate the value of impermanence. If we are in good health and are aware of impermanence, we will take good care of ourselves. When we know that the person we love is impermanent, we will cherish our beloved all the more. Impermanence teaches us to respect and value every moment and all the precious things around us and inside of us. When we practice mindfulness of impermanence, we become fresher and more loving.

It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom — freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

Suffering is admittedly one of the central problems of human existence; but this is because we have a suspicion that it is all for nothing. If we had a certainty about meaning, the suffering would be bearable. With no certainty of meaning, even comfort begins to feel futile.

The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.

The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There's no such thing as permanence at all.

Our suffering is impermanent, and that is why we can transform it. And because happiness is impermanent, that is why we have to nourish it.

To be human is a problem, and the problem expresses itself in anguish.

What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept what is.

All human suffering is a variation on this theme — trying to control the waves, trying to control our present-moment experience so it conforms to our ideas and concepts of how it should be. If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be! I

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.

Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them...Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency. So sorrow becomes our constant companion and overcoming it our problem.

When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies.

The source of suffering is a false belief in permanence and the existence of separate selves.

Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all...