Quotes About Existence

Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it.

I am so happy to be alive in this world I would like to live forever, but I am content not to. Seeing what I have seen has filled me; believing what I believe has filled me.

Nobody owns the hearts of birds.

To believe in the soul—to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view— imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world!

What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too.

The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.

What is my name, o what is my name that I may offer it back to the beautiful world? Have I walked long enough where the sea breaks raspingly all day and all night upon the pale sand?

Everyone now and again wonders about those questions that have no ready answers: first cause, God's existence, what happens when the curtain goes down and nothing stops it, not kissing, not going to the mall, not the Super Bowl. Wild roses, I said to them one morning. Do you have the answers? And if you do, would you tell me? The roses laughed softly. Forgive us, they said. But as you can see, we are just now entirely busy being roses.

This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it— to look around and love the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.

Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world.

Just where does self-awareness begin and end? With the June bug? With the shining, task-ridden ant? With the little cloud of gnats that drifts over the pond?

Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one–the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself–is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed.

I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

The way I'd like to go on living in this world wouldn't hurt anything, I'd just go on walking uphill and downhill, looking around, and so what if half the time I don't know what for —

life is real, and pain is real, but death is an imposter

The moth and the fisheggs are in their place, The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world.

Have you stood, staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers where the birds like tossing fires flash through the trees, their bodies exchanging a certain happiness in the sleek, amazing humdrum of nature's design — blood's heaven, spirit's haven, to which you cannot belong?

I think this is / the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind / a little dying

and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death?

Whitman was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man's inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.