Quotes About Existence

As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us.

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.

Love, Allie concluded, wasn't blind, it simply saw alternate dimensions.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.

Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-- up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-- probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

I've said it before in another book, but I believe it's worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don't need us at all. We'd be dead in a day without them.

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,' he says, 'is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe

Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you.

That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us—that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I've said it before in another book, but I believe it's worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.

The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.