Quotes About Existence

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting this responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

TO say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. If, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow.

There is only now.

All theology is a kind of birthday Each one who is born Comes into the world as a question For which old answers Are not sufficient…

Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. But

This is IT! This is the furthest yet! Who can reach it? I can comprehend the absence of Being But who can comprehend the absence of Nothing? If now, on top of all this, Non-Being IS, Who can comprehend it?

If I penetrate to the depths of my existence, the indefinable, am, that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite I am, which is the very nature of the Almighty.

Before we can see that created things (especially material) are unreal, we must see clearly that they are real.

Our sorry idiot life, our idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care.

What Zen communicates is an awareness that is potentially already there but is not conscious of itself. Zen is then not Kerygma but realization, not revelation but consciousness, not news from the Father who sends His Son into this world, but awareness of the ontological ground of our own being here and now, right in the midst of the world.

The life of the spirit, by integrating us in the real order established by God, puts us in the fullest possible contact with reality--not as we imagine it, but as it really is.

It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer.

He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some "thing" alien to himself. And he proves that the "thing" exists. He convinces himself: "I am therefore some thing." And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a "thing," an "object," like other finite and limited objects of our thought!

Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

It is true that God knows Himself in all the things that exist. He sees them, and it is because He sees them that they exist. It is because He loves them that they are good. His love in them is their intrinsic goodness. The value He sees in them is their value. In so far as He sees and loves them, all things reflect Him.

We know by fresh discovery, the deep reality that is our concrete existence here and now and in the depths of that reality we receive from the Father light, truth, wisdom and peace.

This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible, objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door.

To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us—and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace

There is "no such thing" as God because God is neither a "what" nor a "thing" but a pure "Who."* He is the "Thou" before whom our inmost "I" springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo "I am.

Perhaps the book of life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived and if one has lived nothing, he is not in the book of life.

A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being.

Soul' is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves.