Quotes About Existence

It's a change that has to be motivated by a higher purpose, by the willingness to subordinate what you think you want now for what you want later. But this process produces happiness, "the object and design of our existence." Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.

Victor Frankl suggests that there are three central values in life—the experiential, or that which happens to us; the creative, or that which we bring into existence; and the attitudinal, or our response in difficult circumstances such as terminal illness.

I'm busy—really busy. But sometimes I wonder if what I'm doing will make any difference in the long run. I'd really like to think there was meaning in my life, that somehow things were different because I was here.

process produces happiness, "the object and design of our existence." Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.

Nietzsche: "He who has a 'why' can live with any 'what.'" Dr. Frankl hypothesized that we have three parts to our nature: our body, our mind, and our spirit. But his deepest conviction is that most—not all—diseases originate in the spirit. That is, in a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of hollowness, a sense of purposelessness. No mission. No vision.

we live, and strive, and seek to define the sense of our being. And it is good, for though we compose a scant blink across the eyes of eternity, yet while the blink lasts we choose what we will, create what we may, and share ourselves with each other as the stars did ere they were bereaved.

Are you alive?" "Perhaps. While I have purpose, I move and speak. My eyes behold. Is this life?

Futility is the defining characteristic of life. Pain is the proof of existence.

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

thus, in a sense, we are all doomed. even if we stay away from black holes

One could say: The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary. The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.

For the starship's inhabitants, time now stands still. For planet Earth, the clock has begun ticking...

One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of god's existence.

To manufacture fear you have to mobilize a large portion of the people to accept it exists. That takes work. Blood must be shed. Terrorism, if you will. But to counterfeit fear? That's much easier. All you have to do is silence those who call fear into question.

Sometimes I think the force is stronger in the dead than in the living.

People living deeply," wrote poet and diarist Anaïs Nin, "have no fear of death.

When your life itself becomes the subject matter of the creative process, a very different experience of life opens to you—one in which you are involved with life at its very essence.

Everyone, she says, is his own age of meaning.

Identity was something known in a way utterly removed from the vessel that carried it.

We can't find any definitive beginning or end to … anything really.

The only way we can be free in each moment is to become what each moment is.

There are two kinds of ignorance: blindness and self-deception. Blindness is ignorance of the basic realities of existence: impermanence, dukha, and selflessness. … Self-deception is our belief that we can know intellectually what things are. 'Oh! That's water,' we say. 'Hydrogen and oxygen.' And then we dismiss the actual experience of the moment. ([I]f you really want to know what water is, just take a drink, or go for a walk in the rain, or take a swim.)

we face the woeful prospect that we're intelligent creatures living in a meaningless world.

Reality, of course, is neither concave nor convex, neither cold nor hot, neither self nor other. If we conceive cold apart from the rest of Reality—not only apart from heat, but apart from ourselves as well—we suffer from it.