Quotes About Existence

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.

acute existence failure.

It's not the span of time that counts, but what you do with it. While you humans have been grubbing around the galaxy, looking for a sense of purpose, a meaning to pin on the chain of cosmic accidents that brought you shambling into existence, we have been doing great things. In the span of time that it takes you to sneeze, I can run the equivalent of a year's worth of human consciousness. Imagine all the thinking we have done since our emergence.

I live each day as it comes." "It's the only way. Pedro

Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being. Consider all the inanimate

Only an evolutionary eyeblink separated Kanu from the savannah, and that was just as true for the Risen. Their minds might be fixed on the stars, but their bodies were only a footstep from the dust and heat of Amboseli.

Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.

What's the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?

Soon there would be a final morning, a final afternoon, a final sunrise. She measured her life by these thoughts and then reprimanded herself for not simply enjoying such pleasures while she still could.

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

Somewhere out beyond the Empty there now shone stars that had been born in gas clouds after this room was decorated. There were stars that had been alive then that were just corpses now, if they had left the least trace of themselves. There was just too much past, too much time that had already happened, and our lives were as nothing against that endless black conveyor belt, ceaselessly rolling, stretching and stretching ever further backward into a dread eternity.

There was another intelligence out there, close enough to touch. And even if they were now gone, then the mere existence of their handiwork was wonder enough to fundamentally change humanity's view of the universe.

It was better to live; better to carry a memory of a memory, than suffer the vast burden of knowing. He was not meant to think like a god.

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it.

My perspective is that you should be IN the world, but not OF the world.

I'm a hybrid, from a cultural perspective, but I don't think in these terms. I'm more simple than that. I'm a mammal who will live 70 years, more or less, who believes in God and likes his life.

It is necessary for him who would endure existence with patience that he should conceive himself to be something - that he should be persuaded he is not a cipher in the muster-roll of man.

Ultimately, I feel like there is just a pervasive evidence of God. Though I know that is maybe a controversial thing to say.

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

I'm not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live.

Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there actually are in heaven and earth.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.