Quotes About Existence

Every atom, every minuscule part of the universe is nothing other than movement and change.

Most of us see ourselves as corks floating in a stream … [T]his is yet another frozen view. According to this … , everything … changes except the cork. While we generally admit to changes in our body, our mind, our thoughts, our feelings, our understandings, and our beliefs, we still believe 'I' myself don't change. I'm still me. … an unchanging cork in an ever-changing stream. This is precisely what we believe the self to be – something that doesn't change.

It's not as if, when you see, the world winks out of existence.

Those who are aware," he said, "do not die. Those who are ignorant are as if dead already.

It's in our very trying to define and arrange things for ourselves – trying to identify and assign meaning to things – that we end up creating a world that is ultimately meaningless.

In fixing] on the idea of a universe full of separate, unchanging, persistent things … [w]e also necessarily conceive that each thing must die, must one day come to an end. … [W]hen that thing is the imagined 'I', this prospect naturally terrifies us.

Life exists so the Universe can experience itself.

The "I/here/nowness" of consciousness itself is an aspect of self that transcends any particular content of awareness—it is the context of verbal knowing itself.

As we wrote earlier, the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence.

Jupiter's moons are invisible to the naked eye, and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist. -contemporaries of Galileo Galilei, circa 1610

It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go; that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

Everything that had happened was all part of the same great big something, it had to happen, I just knew

I didn't come from a religious background. Growing up, everything was proof-driven. If you couldn't see it, couldn't experience it, it didn't exist. But I've had experiences that bitch-slapped me out of this lower-order mentality. My need for proof—I've been given it. Now, if you want to tell me that God doesn't exist, well, now you have to prove that to me.

Hallucinogens then do the same job as religion - they provide proof of unity, which is still the only known cure for fear of death.

I longed for release from whatever it was I was. But whatever I was lay hard and immovable in me, like bone; I would never be free of my own weight.

The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don't care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.

Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away.

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence. Death becomes a mere rite of passage, like puberty or a midlife crisis.

human material existence is limited by ideas, not by stuff.

When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him what jazz is: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence. The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune maybe no one's fault.

And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.

Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary contains the following entry: Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.