Quotes About Existence

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.

por qué iban «ellos» a molestarse con el tedio de la existencia humana, y menos aún con el del gobierno humano?

Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.

The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been Christians, since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master's announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)

Indeed, Ockham stated that it cannot be strictly proved that god, if defined as a being who possesses the qualities of supremacy, perfection, uniqueness, and infinity, exists at all. However, if one intends to identify a first cause of the existence of the world, one may choose to call that "god" even if one does not know the precise nature of the first cause.

If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not? The

Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

For those who find it remarkable that we live in a universe of Something, just wait. Nothingness is heading on a collision course right toward us.

If belief in a god has to proceed from the assumption that he exists, belief in revelation has first to proceed from the assumption that a god exists and then to go further to the assumption that he communicates his will to certain men. But both are mere assumptions. Neither is, in the present state of knowledge, at all capable of proof.

the God of birds and trees would have to be also the God of birth defects and cancer.

all children are born into a losing struggle with death

Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found

I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.

For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness. And if some part of the non-entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep water, then it will return to find itself homeless.

What is one ever doing anywhere?

To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean.

Beneath outer consciousness, two other beings, anonymous, impersonal, without labels, had met and recognized each other and clasped hands.

A life without truth is illogical. Surak wrote that the truth is simply the actual state of the universe. To live at odds with the truth is to be in conflict with reality itself. Such an existence is unsustainable.

Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

Man's collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.

Think'st thou heaven is such a glorious thing? I tell thee, 'tis not so fair as thou Or any man that breathes on earth.

Anger is the spirits telling you that you are alive.

Love is not something you think about, it is a state in which you dwell.