Quotes About Existence

Mind exists as a Principle in the universe, just as electricity exists as a principle.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

Everybody dies alone. That's a fact. Some more alone than others.

He wakes up and thinks, I'm alive. This simple fact fills him with a sense of accomplishment. He didn't die in his sleep.

if there is an afterlife, then nothing here mattered, and if there isn't an afterlife, nothing here mattered.

I'm living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

As participants in a mobile culture, our default is to move. God embraces our broken world, and I have no doubt that God can use our movement for good. But I am convinced that we lose something essential to our existence as creatures if we do not recognize our fundamental need for stability. Trees can be transplanted, often with magnificent results. But their default is to stay.

You come into this world, not knowing who you are, and sometimes, if you live long enough, you go out not knowing who you are.

Reality, as frightening as it is, is very very funny.

We are stardust,We are golden,And we've got to get ourselvesBack to the garden.

we are stardust, billion year old carbon. we are golden, caught in the devil's bargain.

Hij wandelde en was er niet. Melancholie niet langer een gevoel. Het was veranderd in een eigenschap.

Tijd was ook maar een afspraak, gemaakt door gewone mensen die een gewone wereld wilden.

What reality is is an emergent consequence of the interaction between something that is painfully limited-- like us-- and whatever the absolute is, which is something that is completely without borders.

The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that's so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

The secret to your existence is right in front of you. It manifests itself as all those things you know you should do, but are avoiding.

we may not exactly be God, but we're not exactly nothing, either.

Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance

Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.

It may well be, therefore, that the true meaning of life is not to be found in what is objective, but in what is subjective (but still universal).

Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.

When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations—in the depths—it's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.

if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being, if you attempt to do that, then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you are insufficient and mortal and bound by tragedy