Quotes About Existence

The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don't sing all the time

in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

The relationships that we have with writers are quite a thing; they're different from the ones we have with actors or musicians or composers or politicians. Everything for me is the writer; without him, I don't exist. So he is first. The actor gets all the fame and glory, but I don't know about endurance.

You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

The boundary between now and not yet will softly blur. And the clean line between your discrete body and all creation will someday be no more.

The story is not about someone else. It is not even about you. It is you. The one who "lives" in the dream is the one who dreams. Just as the dream softly pulses beneath everyday waking-noticeable only when the din and clatter of daytime is stilled by sleep-so the one who remembers a dream brings a new facet to waking.

Consequently, they who cleave with all their mental powers to God … [they have lost their] existence like a drop which has fallen into the great sea and has come to its root and therefore is one with the waters of the sea and it is not possible to recognize it as a separate thing at all.

But we must not think that just because we have words for all the parts of a tree, a tree really has all those parts. The leaf does not know, for instance, when it stops being a leaf and becomes a twig. And the trunk is not aware that it has stopped being a trunk and has become the roots. Indeed, the roots do not know when they stop being roots and become soil, nor the soil the moisture, nor the moisture the atmosphere, nor the atmosphere the sunlight." (pp 54-55)

We participate in a perpetual organic conversation with our universe.

This is the great dream of which each individual dream is a personal manifestation. Dream is ontogenetic. Myth is phylogenetic. "Dreams and especially myths are a primary medium for intuitive insights into the ultimate nature of human existence . . . [they] are not restricted to ... sleep. They pertain rather to the symbolic dimension of human experience as a whole."24

If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born.

every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. and, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. it really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust.

Reality doesn't owe us comfort.

The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time — including life — and that doesn't mean it's special.

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake.

The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn't require God to actually exist.

If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

Time does not die; only people.

We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born...

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

L'idée de ma survie dans ma postérité ne me touche pas beaucoup. L'avenir, cette énigme irritante, m'ennuie. Mais choisir son passé, se laisser flotter dans le temps révolu comme on remonte la vague, toucher au fond de soi le secret de ceux qui nous ont engendré: voilà qui permet de rêver, qui laisse le passage à une autre vie, à un flux rafraîchissant.

They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.