Quotes About Existence

I always said all my life, if I wasn't born and they gave me the question, I'd say, I don't want to be born.

A lot of us are working harder than we want, at things we don't like to do. Why? It figures! In order to afford the sort of existence we don't care to live.

Everybody is worried about dying, but the cause of death is birth, so if you don't want to die, you don't get born!

If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we've got the least excuse for it.

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination... I photograph the things I don't want to paint, things that are already in existence.

JESUS: I'm not above it all--I'm right here in it, don't you see that?

Instead of expressing deep hurt, the wounded female lives a miserable existence and gripes and complains about everything. She becomes addicted to her misery because it allows her to forget about her anger, or at least postpone dealing with it. Her dependency on misery is just as difficult to break as someone else's dependency on crack cocaine. Both are means to a different reality that allows for pain to be deferred.

There are as many great reasons to regularly pray to God as there are to live and breathe and stay alive.

This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.

The meaning of man's life, as we have seen, is not measured by what he has, but by what he is. No matter how many possessions we have amassed, how much wealth we have accrued, how respected and secure our position is in society, how numerous the pieces of information we have accumulated, in moments of lucidity we may still abruptly perceive the dreadful futility of it all, the overwhelming emptiness and pointlessness of such a life.

Gotama did for the self was Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear just as it did before. Gotama mo more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.

Is it really conceivable, given all of that immensity, all that structure, that we are truly alone? That life emerged here, and nowhere else?

The soul of man is the highest product of God's creative handiwork. Now, after God has spent untold time in creating man and endowing him with a soul, which is the reflection of his image, is it reasonable to suppose that man lives here on earth for a brief span and then is extinguished by death? That the soul perishes with the physical body? That it existed in vain?

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

The question that Darwin's early critics posed was this: How could he reconcile his theory of gradual evolution with a fossil record so discontinuous that it had given rise to the names of the major distinct periods of geological time, particularly when the first animal forms seemed to spring into existence during the Cambrian as if from nowhere?

Neither wanted to claim that these discoveries "proved" the existence of God. They cautioned that science cannot "prove" anything with absolute certainty.

The functional design of organisms and their features would…seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin's greatest accomplishment [however] to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."20

It is a great folly to deny or doubt of the existence or being of God: or, an atheist is a great fool.

I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.

though the corners were routinely used to store farm machinery and fodder for the animals and occasionally to get a sensitive animal in out of the sun. Primarily the building existed

For the Time Being, Annie Dillard. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1999

Live only in your art," he wrote in his diary, "for you are so limited by your senses. This is nevertheless the only existence for you.

wretched existence Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Patience, they say, is what I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so—Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not; I am ready.—Forced to become a philosopher already in my twenty-eighth year.—Divine One, thou seest my inmost soul; thou knowest that therein dwells the love of mankind and the desire to do good Ã¢â'¬Â¦

He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.