Quotes About Existence

Years afterward, at odd moments, he would look back upon those days that followed his conversation with Gordon Finch and would be unable to recall them with any clarity at all. It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days;

But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. ...... It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehend them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The

And it might be amusing to pass through the world once more before I return to the cloistered and slow extinction that awaits us all.

He felt at times that he was kind of a vegetable and he longed for something--even pain-- to pierce him, to bring him alive.

It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves--so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.

its flatness, and its yellow-greenness, its high walls of mountain wooded with the deep green of pine in which ran the flaming red-gold of turning aspen, its jutting rock and hillock, all roofed with the intense blue of the airless sky—it seemed to him that the contours of the place flowed beneath his eyes, that his very gaze shaped what he saw, and in turn gave his own existence form and place.

came to know that loss was the condition of our living. It is a knowledge that one cannot give to another.

This came to be a ritual, more and more meaningless as it was repeated, but a ritual which nevertheless gave his life the only shape it now had.

betrayed by certain artificialities of conduct, thrust from a great mechanical world upon this bare plateau of existence that fronted the wilderness.

But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?

Reality is relative. Devils, evil spirits, witches and so on became real enough to the people who believed in them. Just as God is to people who believe in Him. When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant.

When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant. 'That's

La vida, en todas sus manifestaciones, es conflicto

Just that mere existence is not enough. One exists by barter. One lives by giving – and taking.

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence," she said reflectively.

The Upper One sent the Tribulation to destroy them and remind them that existence means constant change.

For today is part of yesterday. And yesterday and today are parts of being alive. And being alive is not just an affair of the days going clonk-clonk-clonk like the pendulum of a grandfather clock: being alive is something continuous, that does not repeat; something that one should be aware of all the time, sleeping and waking...

There was nothing but myself. I hung in a timeless, spaceless, forceless void that was neither light, nor dark. I had entity, but no form; awareness, but no senses; mind, but no memory. I wondered, is this – this nothingness – my soul? And it seemed that I had wondered that always, and should go on wondering it for ever…

asked. 'Just that mere existence is not enough. One exists by barter. One lives by giving – and taking.' 'I

Death is just the shocking end of animation; it is dissolution that is final.

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What's happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?

a minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us ... the individual freed from the order of time,