Quotes About Existence

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

A person shows himself for an instant as in a photograph but clearer and in the background something which is bigger than his shadow.

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that.

I believe we have a physical body and a soul. It doesn't matter what religion you are, whether or not you believe in God. I think people believe that there is a soul and a body.

The sense of being a separate, egoic self begins with the astral, not with the physical, body. The soul is individualized spirit.

I know there's a consciousness energy that operates completely independent of the physical body you inhabit, that maintains... awareness after the body's gone.

If we were all perfected beings, we wouldn't be here in the physical world.

I'm not a very big fan of science fiction. I think that I'm a very big fan of living in the physical world.

Fear of nothingness is fear of a certain physicality, a physicality whose phenomena I cannot predictably demarcate from its reality in advance.

If I cannot sing, I have the impression that I no longer exist. I mean it. I mean that I am not physically there.

Energy is a concept that has been coined by physicists. There is no observable thing known as energy anywhere.

Apparently, some physicists argue that time is curved. I suppose this means that the past is in some way still present.

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.

The bohemian artist who exists only for his art, it's a myth. OK, it might have been true for Giacometti, but it certainly wasn't for Picasso or Mozart.

When people say, 'I don't see you enough,' well just because you don't see me don't mean I don't exist, or just 'cause you haven't heard me don't mean I haven't been making noise. But if I keep making noise, you'll pick up.

And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.

If God is real, and he did give a piece of Himself to us, it is our brain.

Time is running out to permeate the piece.

On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

Ariel Pink never really existed because he was always Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, but then people started doing interviews with Ariel Pink as if Ariel Pink existed.

Man - life in general - seems irrelevant to the workings of the universe: a mere smudge of water, grease, and carbon on a pinpoint planet circling a star of no special consequence.

I grew up in a little town in Arkansas called Clarksville and it was a weird existence, you know? I grew up white trash; we had holes in our walls.