Quotes About Existence

El hombre recibe un cuerpo, pero no el sustento para el mismo. Se le otorga una mente, pero no el contenido de la misma. Para vivir ha de actuar, pero antes de poder hacerlo debe saber la naturaleza y el proposito de su acción. No puede conseguir alimento sin conocimiento del mismo ni del modo de obtenerlo.

It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives.

Dagny, it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

Por su parte, él descubrió aquella noche que su reconquistado amor a la existencia no le era otorgado por haber sentido otra vez deseo de ella, sino que el deseo se suscitó luego de haber recuperado su mundo; el apego al valor y al sentido del mismo.

That doesn't matter. Not even that they'll destroy it. Only that it had existed." She

were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels...

he watched it with curiosity. It was strange to be conscious of another person's existence, to feel it as a close, urgent necessity; a necessity without qualifications, neither pleasant nor painful, merely final like an ultimatum.

the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence

it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one's course—not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.

God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit. A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being.

fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction.

need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran.

This nation is very strange. It watches tyranny in silence and in time it proves its own will—the fact of its existence—through passive resistance

There is a universal reality in ourselves that aligns us with a universal reality that is everywhere.

You do not need to seek freedom in a different land, for it exists with your own body, heart, mind, and soul.

You exist without the feeling of existence.

Perhaps there is nothing to be understood, perhaps understanding is simply not to be found, is not applicable to such a thing. But it is hard, hard, not to try to understand, even for me, who accepts that all is nothing, that sense does not exist.

Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.

Mostly, however, I am a mystic. A mystic is someone who understands, contacts, and maps the invisible roads inside of us. Since I was a child, I've always felt as comfortable navigating these inner highways as I have moving on the external plane of existence. It seems that I show up in people's lives when they're ready to cross a threshold into more consciousness, healing, and awakening.

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be living or alive, as in living God. But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?

You may think of yourself as a freestanding individual, a unique point of consciousness in the universe, but in many ways you are just subbing for absent family members or departed ancestors.