Quotes About Existence

The I think, I am , is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.

Far from it being true that man and his activity makes the world comprehensible, he is himself the most incomprehensible of all, and drives me relentlessly to the view of the accursedness of all being, a view manifested in so many painful signs in ancient and modern times. It is precisely man who drives me to the final despairing question: Why is there something? Why not nothing?

man's being is essentially his own deed .

Die Natur soll der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur sein. Hier also, in der absoluten Identität des Geistes in uns und der Natur außer uns, muß sich das Problem, wie eine Natur außer uns möglich sei, auflösen.

I lie on the bosom of the infinite world. At this moment I am its soul, for I feel all its powers and its infinite life as my own.

Like Chaos, before the world was created

A healthy nature needs no God or immortality

The living is a species of the dead and not a very attractive one.

Promethean minds believe themselves to be creatures of chance, moving freely in a vacuum and capable of "self creation",all within the framework of an existence devoid of meaning;it seems to them that the world is absurd, but no one notices—and this is typical—the absurdity of admitting the appearance within an absurd world of a being regarded as capable of noticing the absurdity.

Le rationalisme d'une grenouille au fond d'un puits, c'est de nier l'existence des montagnes, ce qui peut être «logique», mais n'a rien à voir avec la réalité. [The rationalism of a frog living at the bottom of a well is to deny the existence of mountains: perhaps this is "logic", but it has nothing to do with reality]

Toute erreur doctrinale s'accompagne d'une erreur psychologique à l'égard de ceux qui en sont indemnes : l'athéisme par exemple se prend volontiers pour un héroïsme moral; il ne peut concevoir de théisme libre de toute faiblesse, de tout désir sentimental. Suspicion injuste, car on peut tout admettre par sentimentalité, l'inexistence de Dieu aussi bien que le contraire.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.

You won't understand life and death until you're ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

The very idea of higher states of consciousness is absurd. Comparing one state of consciousness to another and saying one is "higher" and the other is "mundane" is like eating a banana and complaining it's not a very good apple.

The pain of having your dreams come true appears vividly when you realize that even if your dreams really come true, they never really come true. From birth to death it's just like this

In order to deal with the fear of annihilation you have to face annihilation again and again and again. It's not enough just to understand this intellectually. It's not enough just to read about this. You need to watch yourself being annihilated right now. If you can manage to sit quietly as you disappear from existence moment by moment, then you can see it's really nothing to be afraid of. You gotta meditate. Nobody likes to hear that. But it's true.

If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die.

it's still absurd from a Buddhist standpoint to say the mountain on which the old man / wild fox met Hyakujo is the same one that existed millions of years ago. Yet there is still some kind of continuity from the past to the present, and we all know that.

At best, past and future are no more than reference material for the eternal now. The only real facts are those at the present moment.

So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.

When you're alive there's nothing but life. When you die there's nothing but death. So when life comes, be alive. When death comes, die. You don't need to dodge either one, and you don't need to long for either one.

Maybe to exist as a thing separate from other things is itself pain.

The entire universe has no gaps to accommodate space." Space is not emptiness between one solid thing and another solid thing. Those solid things are