Quotes About Existence

When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that's the real world.

Metaphysics is never more than semantic pleasantries anyway.

To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called 'mind,' what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard." "The mind is nothing you use," I say. "The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.

I've always enjoyed this time, early in the morning, gazing intently at a pure white canvas. "Canvas Zen" is my term for it. Nothing is painted there yet, but it's more than a simple blank space. Hidden on that white canvas is what must eventually emerge. As I look more closely, I discover various possibilities, which congeal into a perfect clue as to how to proceed. That's the moment I really enjoy. The moment when existence and nonexistence coalesce.

If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. Don't you think so? They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words.

Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.

If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn't our genetic purpose—to transmit DNA—be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

There we were, sitting quietly on the edge of the world, and no one could see us. I just wanted to stay this way forever. I knew that was impossible – our life here was just a momentary illusion, and someday reality would yank us back to the world we came from.

The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I'm in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness.

But there's such a thing as a way of living that's guided by the way a person's going to die.

Everything is so temporary, she thought, so unrooted, and any one of us can just stand up and leave. She tried to imagine the world, even just one square mile of it, from the point of view of God—the appearances and vanishings, the abandoned objects, doors left open in haste—how it must look over centuries, but she felt her breath catch in her throat.

The Universe in a Nutshell

You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction.

In my grandparents' time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere...in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything... I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything.

Of course I believe that other world exists. If they didn't life wouldn't be interesting. It's like love: you can't see but it exists-simply because you believe it. It's just a matter of believing.

Every life-form, no matter how small, contains the outside universe within it's internal universe.

If God was able to create [from nothing] that which had never existed, He can certainly recreate that which had already existed.

Radical selfcare is what's going to get us through this kind of endlessly inane questioning of the validity of our existence, through menopause, and through all of the many other changes that are still yet to come.

the way Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote, "That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet.

How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives." There

Pierrot knew that everything in the world was alive. Everything was composed of molecules that shook and vibrated and hummed. There was no such thing as permanence. Even the most stalwart object—such as a statue in the park—was struggling to keep itself together.

All life began underneath the ocean. So I'm giving people a taste of what existence might have been like before civilization.' 'But we were amoebas and tiny shrimplike creatures. We didn't start off in deep-sea-diving outfits.' 'We all come into this world with an oxygen tube in our belly button.' 'True.' She put her hands up to her own belly. There had so recently been a sea creature evolving in there, trying its best to get its act together. It had perished under the deep, deep, deep sea.

Every day the average person will witness six miracles. But it isn't that we don't believe in miracles-we just don't believe that miracles are miriacles. There are so many miracles all around us.