Quotes About Existence

Darkness may cover light, but that is not the same thing as putting it out. Whereas, to overcome darkness, all light need do is to exist.

Twentieth-century physics, going full circle back to Heracleitus, postulates that all matter is in motion. In other words, there is no thing, only energy.

Human beings are not nature's favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.

Nature is forever playing solitaire with herself.

Taking the guest's hand, Love asks, "Who made the eyes but I?" (11–12). This brilliant sally asserts that man cannot look away from God, since everything we look at—and indeed our mental faculties as well as our organs of sight—were made by God. These "eyes" include the "I" of personal identity.

idealism, however sabotaged by untidy reality, is a fundamental human value that separates us from the animal realm.

Man's spiritual trajectory ends in the rubbish heap of his own mother-born body.

We are back at the dawn of time. Firmament has not yet separated from the waters. The sun is only a yolky yellow in the albuminous jelly of the mother-stuff. Primeval ocean swarms with slimy life. But the water is also man's body shot with veins. These serpents, writhing with Vergilian opalescence, are the chains that bind us, our physical life.

Religion gives you a huge vision of the universe and human existence. If you take away religion, you have to replace it with something else. So today the educated class worships politics.

At that moment the rooster was a tiny, light brown, fluffy ball. No clues to future developments could yet be discerned. All existence went along happily under the will of heaven. With the accelerating motion of nonexistence, unstable embarrassing details gradually displaced themselves.

Don't you think it's weird when someone has photographs of themselves all over the place? It's like they're trying to prove they exist.

Some seem to regard existence here as camping out, and never make a real home, living in their trunks for years. Even those that have homes are making changes all the time, trading one for another, or building afresh. yes, really, it's almost like living in a big tent, with houses instead of tents.

If I remember it, did it happen?

Beings who've succeeded on earth for millennia don't seek, and should not require, our approval. They belong here as do we. We do ourselves no favors by asking whether their existence is worth our while. We are hardly in a position to judge, hurtling and lurching along as we are with no goal, no plan except: bigger, faster, more.

the world appears beautiful so that the living may love being alive in it. Life has developed-and we have inherited-a sense of the beautiful to let us feel at home in the world, without further reason.

In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

We are all star stuff.

We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.