Quotes About Existence

Les grands moments de l'existence, les naissances, la maladie, la mort ont le don de vous ramener à l'extrême banalité et de vous faire monter aux lèvres ces expressions toute faites, nées de la sagesse populaire, et qui traduisent mieux qu'un langage savant les réactions viscérales (47).

But will science ever account for it all? That I leave to God.

That which has no existence cannot be destroyed -- that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense -- nonsense upon stilts.

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself.

Life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism.

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.

I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas -- such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which color it in turns. I change, then, without ceasing.

This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

Did men but consider that the sun, moon, and stars, and every other object of the senses, are only so many sensations in their minds, which have no other existence but barely being perceived, doubtless they would never fall down and worship their own ideas; but rather address their homage to that eternal invisible Mind which produces and sustains all things.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds.

Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?

I think I know the trees Will never love me and we're here as accidentally

I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Bookended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end.

I feel nothing except a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.

It is not matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that creates an illusion of matter.

We understand the rules because we made them up—not in the state we currently find ourselves as human beings, of course, but back when we were literally one with God, before God decided to temporarily become us.

For our purposes here, the term "spiritual worldview" is shorthand for the supposition that reality—your own nature and your conscious being—involve both tangible, physical matter and an immaterial "something." This immaterial "something" is intimately, indeed essentially, involved in the existence of consciousness and life, and is ultimately traceable to a divine origin and purpose.

The heart never taking a break. The bowels never taking a nap. When it stopped, that was the day it was all over.

But some day, somehow she would move into soul. It happened to everybody who had ever lived since the beginning of time. Soul was her, minus her body.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don't want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he's on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn't see us and he doesn't care. Today I want my piece of bread, not in Paradise.