Quotes About Existence

us to comprehend, for we are ourselves part of wyrd and cannot stand back to observe it as if it were a separate force.

But the threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind. The secrets of wyrd do not lie in our word-hoards, but are locked in the soul. We can only discern the shadows

Nothing may happen without wyrd, for it is present in everything, but wyrd does not make things happen. Wyrd is created at every instant and so wyrd is the happening.

Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the insatiability of the present, and the unforeseeability of the future.

A very much larger number have existed over the past history of life, owing to the fact that the ultimate fate of nearly all species is extinction, as described in Chapter 4.)

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.

The ultimate paradox, of course, is that even though we're all going to die, we've all got to live in the meantime…

You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.

So if we assume we are not the only civilisation in the galaxy, then at least a few others must have arisen billions of years ahead of us. But where are they?

Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil'.

Thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams exist on Earth because of electrical activity inside a 1.5-kilogram blob of stuff, which hasn't changed much since the earliest modern humans began the long journey out of Africa

You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Lucy was little more than an upright chimpanzee; an animal, a genetic survival machine. We bring art, science, literature and meaning to the Earth; we are a world away, and yet separated by the blink of an eye.

More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

not that I was too out of breath, but that I was, as it were, too alive, living too many lives at once, as if I were breathing for many men. In retrospect, this realization seems far from cogent, simply another layer of ontological mystification, but at the time it seemed akin to revelation.

Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?

The world is a strange place , thought Haupt, alone in the dark, almost unbearably so. And yet, it is the only place I have. And I'm not even entirely sure I have it.

But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It simply tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.

Life is fleeting, constantly spiralling into the past. And all we're ever able to hold on to is the precious present.

Transcendence and dissolution, always the same thing.

The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.

Everybody lived like a character in a one-act play that nobody understood; getting by from one moment to the next was like trying to hold on to your hat in a gusty wind.