Quotes About Existence

It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life.

But here's life's most limiting truth – it's always now, always here, never then and there. And

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.

Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures.

The thing about Satan is that he's amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people's minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn't exist after all, and then he's free to do his worst.

But here's life's most limiting truth - it's always now, always here, never then and there.

he felt unusually warm toward humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was.

Love wasn't possible without a self, and nor was thinking.

In Leon's life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed. Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all.

The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.

Self-aware existence. I'm lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it's for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air. As his mother used to say, another element; the day is changed, Henry, when you take a swim. And that day is bound to be marked out from all the rest.

But here's life's most limiting truth - it's always now, always here, never then and there.

Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.

God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

J'aurais dû traverser l'existence avec ce privilège que donne la beauté, de pouvoir prendre les hommes et les jeter. Au lieu de quoi c'étaient eux qui m'abandonnaient ou mouraient. Ou bien se mariaient.

The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil's Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things.

Que los filósofos de la ciencia se engañen creyendo lo contrario, pero la física estaba exenta de contaminación humana, describía un mundo que existiría igual si no existieran los hombres y las mujeres y todas sus tristezas.

It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

We'll always be troubled by how things are—that's how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.