IMPERMANENT • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Impermanent

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

Listen

Impermanent

adjective

Not permanent; not lasting. Synonym: temporary. "Impermanent palm cottages" , "A temperary arrangement" , "Temporary housing" Antonym: permanent.

Existing or enduring for a limited time only.

See more definitions of Impermanent...

See images of 'Impermanent'

Antonyms of 'Impermanent'

Etymology of 'Impermanent'

Share |

"Impermanent" Quotes from Famous Books

... reserve marriage for the unions sanctioned by legal forms. Or take the union of two people, each of whom has prior matrimonial engagements. Such a union may, as the records of the divorce court show, be anything but impermanent; but it does not make for clearness to call such an union marriage. Let us take a third example—a New Hebridean girl purchased, or in Upa stolen, for the use of the young men, who, of course, reside in their club-house. If any of the bachelors there resident chooses to recognise her children, ...

— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... none of the fictitious realities of the classics, none of the grotesquenesses of chivalry, none of the allegory of the middle ages; there is no sectarianism either of politics or religion, no miser, no witch,—no common witch,—no astrology—nothing impermanent of however long duration; but he stands like the yew tree in Lorton vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none in particular; a living image of endless self-reproduction, like the immortal tree ...

— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent ...

— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... were lofty, a ripple of sunshine flowed over the ceilings; and the periodical invasions of tourists from some passenger steamer in the harbor flitted through the wind-swept dusk of the apartments with the tumult of their unfamiliar voices and impermanent presences, like relays of migratory shades condemned to speed headlong round the earth without leaving a trace. The babble of their irruptions ebbed out as suddenly as it had arisen; the draughty corridors and the long chairs of the verandas knew their sight-seeing hurry or their prostrate ...

— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad