Quotes About Existence

Everything may exist for a while - even justice. But the true state of the universe is anarchy. It is the mortal's tragedy that he can never accept this.

Yet without Chaos there would be no Creation, and perhaps no Creator. That is the simple truth of all existence, Lord Elric. The promise of immortality.

Tanelorn had taken many forms in her endless existence, but all those forms, save one, had been beautiful.

We are friends to Death, but not His servants.

Arthur Hobhouse is a happening. I've been a happening for sixty five years, or thereabouts, and the time has come now for me to put my life down on paper. For me this will be the birth certificate I never had. It's to prove to me and to anyone else who reads it that at least I was here, that I happened.

I have wasted a lot of time living.

Death means you are in the third person.

Half a page --- and the morning is already ancient.

Il y a toujours une histoire, une histoire qui attend. Qui existe à peine. À laquelle on ne s'attache que peu à peu et qu'on nourrit. On découvre la carapace qui contiendra notre personnage et le mettra à l'épreuve. On trouve alors le chemin que sera sa vie. (p.179)

Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall.

during the night, in the no-longer-damp path of its stream. Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly

There's water in my bones a ghost of a chance

Still, this was broken stone. It was not a human life.

We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. . . .

We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.

Sartre puts it, value arises simply from our choices. What we choose, we value simply because we have chosen it (and apparently we remain scot-free at any moment to nonvalue it by simply un-choosing it). In other words, we do not choose (in his view) because we see the value of something. We see the value of something because we have chosen it.

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.

R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.

our everyday waking consciousness "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.

consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think. Carhart-Harris

consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains.

if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James, forbids[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality