Quotes About Existence

As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like claiming to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.

We should perceive that man's period of historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to allow of any considerable mental change.

What else does anyone have except for a collection of slightly painful memories?

So we do have our exits and our entrances and we are perhaps mere, but I think if one keep a certain joyousness in life which should be in playing, then good for one, but it's slightly more serious than that.

Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.

Probably the simplest hypothesis... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter.

I wanted to escape the drudgery of a small town existence. Any place bigger than Gwalior was fine. I took the first train to Delhi because that was the only fare I could afford.

America's lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence.

I'm just the smallest dot in a big map of human history.

Everything dies, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest galaxy.

I love reality. I love the world. I love the smell of it. I love it.

The fact that you can even make a record and leave a document that you were here, that's nothing to sneeze at.

I've had so many people tell me that they are shocked that AM radio still even exists with all the different listening options.

You only have so much time on this planet.

Everything that lives, it seems, must play host to the germ of its own dissolution.

it tells me that consciousness is primary to the physical universe.

What opened up before me was, for lack of a better word, a space, but not our ordinary concept of space, just the pure awareness of a realm without form and void of content. And into that realm came a celestial entity, which was the emergence of the physical world. It was like the big bang, but without the boom or the blinding light. It was the birth of the physical universe. In

I myself am identical with nature.

felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, including the distinct sense that death was illusory, in the sense that it is a door we walk through into another plane of existence, that we're sprung from an eternity to which we will return.

existential distress

Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in "Nature": Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts . . .   —William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Surrealism also refuses the representation of reality: reality can only be; its existence proves its reality. Fiction thereby becomes impossible or is, by definition, false.

No, my friends, the fact of the matter was stated to me by a hobo I met many years ago in the streets of San Francisco. As we spoke, and I looked into his startlingly blue eyes with a shock of white hair, I asked him (he told me his name was Moses), "Moses, do you believe in God?" He looked at me in a puzzled manner and replied, "Who do you think created me?" That solved it for me. I have met many believing people who don't need proof.