Quotes About Existence

Truth] will keep your soul from withering and dying while you encounter the inevitable tragedy of life. It will help you avoid the terrible desire to seek vengeance for that tragedy-part of the terrible sin of Being, which everything must bear gracefully, just so it can exist.

Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack? The answer? Limitation.

deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.

LIFE IS SUFFERING. THAT'S CLEAR. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth.

Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.

If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you're lost. Nothing will save you—certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions.

Though thirty spokes may form the wheel, it is the hole within the hub which gives the wheel utility. It is not the clay the potter throws, which gives the pot its usefulness, but the space within the shape, from which the pot is made. Without a door, the room cannot be entered, and without its windows it is dark Such is the utility of non-existence.212

The moral of Genesis I is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good.

If Mother Nature wasn't so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates.

El destino obliga a todos los miembros de la raza humana a comprender su aislamiento, su individualidad, su sometimiento abyecto a las duras condiciones de la existencia mortal.

We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them.

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. Furthermore, when their social contraptions fail to fly, ideologues blame not themselves but all who see through the simplifications.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man's Search for Meaning, drew a similar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.

We're pack animals,beasts of burden. We must each bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.

To me, cats are a manifestation of nature, of Being, in an almost pure form. Furthermore, they are a form of Being that looks at human beings and approves.

Though thirty spokes may form the wheel, it is the hole within the hub which gives the wheel utility. It is not the clay the potter throws, which gives the pot its usefulness, but the space within the shape, from which the pot is made. Without a door, the room cannot be entered, and without its windows it is dark Such is the utility of non-existence.212 A

If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good.

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how."61

Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.

El sentido de nuestras limitaciones no es el sufrimiento; es la existencia misma. Se nos ha otorgado la capacidad soportar voluntariamente el peso terrible de nuestra mortalidad. Le damos la espalda a esa capacidad y nos degradamos a nosotros mismos porque tenemos miedo de la responsabilidad.

Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person's existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself

To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.

The existence of conscience, for example, provides some evidence for that, as does the fact that religious experiences can reliably be induced chemically, as well as through practices such as dancing, chanting, fasting, and meditating.

Self-love is the only antidote to the chaos of existence. And if you don't love and care for yourself and your own needs, you will cause unnecessary suffering both for yourself and others.