Quotes About Existence

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

As you get older you strip away the things you don't have time for, and then you are left with only the things you have time for. Your life gets skinnier and skinnier until you wonder why you go on. You go on because there are things that must get done. You become no longer a person so much as a place, an unfunny place where things come to get done.

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as "a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact."45 As an intuitionist, I'd say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion.

Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.

Life is what we deem it, and our lives are the creations of our minds.

But take away the violence and you didn't have serenity. What remained were what psychiatrists labeled the negative symptoms of psychosis: apathy, flat mood, deadened voice, blunted movement, impoverished thinking, language stripped of nuance and humor. An existence devoid of surprise and joy.

No other road, no other way, no day but today.

No Day, But Today~

life amounts, above all else, to the recruiting of witnesses.

He...wondered if his own occasional doubts about the existence of God might in some way be mutual. Did anyone in the heavens really believe in him, Andrew Green, this awkward boy below, his spirit, his potential for good? His own question frightened him into muteness, the kind of silence the living rarely know, the moon hanging sullied by smoke in the sky, filthy with the expulsions of men.

I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear.

Quoting from Hegel and Jünger, he argued that the State could reach its ideal point of unity only in and through war: "If the individual is the negation of the State, then war is the negation of that negation. War is the moment of absolute socialization of the collective existence of the people, the Volk." But

It doesn't exactly fill me with pride." "For what, being a white man?" "For being a carbon based life-form.

I'm going to be dead for a long time. Let me be awake as much as I can for now.

What terrified her most was the thought that staying alive had become nothing more than a habit. That was it. A reflex action without further or deeper purpose.

I can't be your ghost right now. I need to exist

It's great to be alive, isn't it? Especially when you consider the alternative.

Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?

We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.

A creed that tells us that we are no more than selfish genes, with nothing in principle to separate us from the animals, in a society whose strongest motivators are money and success, in a universe that came into existence for no reason whatsoever and for no reason will one day cease to be, will never speak as strongly to the human spirit as one that tells us we are in the image and likeness of God in a universe he created in love.

What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning.