Quotes About Existence

We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake...

I forget how many thousand eggs go wrong for one codfish that gets hatched. But as Berkeley said long ago, it is idle to censure the creation as wasteful if you believe in a creator who has unlimited stuff to play with.

Taking a very gloomy view of the future of the human race, let us suppose that it can only expect to survive for two thousand million years longer, a period about equal to the past age of the earth. Then, regarded as a being destined to live for three-score years and ten, humanity, although it has been born in a house seventy years old, is itself only three days old.

There is no God, no man-made God; a bigger, stronger, crueller man; Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere Thought, the life of Life, began.

The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

There is surely a piece of Divinity within us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.

There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living. All things fall under this name. The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God.

Light that makes things seen makes some things invisible. Were it not for darkness, and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of creation had remained unseen, and the stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the horizon with the sun, and there was not an eye to behold them.

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the World without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.

Times before you, when even living men were antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world could not be properly said to go unto the greater number.

We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions. The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us ... And, even after they die, they are still there. I am made of the dead.

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs.

a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.

My mother's idiosyncratic definition of the word is the following: we all suffer and we all die."Never, ever," my mother said to me when I was eleven,"say 'pass away' for 'to die.' People die. They don't evaporate.

Le cou n'est-il pas l'endroit où finit la tête et où le corps commence? (p.148)

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

Tolerating cracks is part of being alive.

Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.