Quotes About Existence

Death is not sad. The sad thing is most people don't live at all.

How do you know you haven't been asleep your whole life? How do you know you're not asleep right now?

To the fish, the sea is air.

Death is not sad; the sad thing is that most people don't ever really live at all.

Die Welt ist ein Rätsel. Ist doch egal, ob wir sie verstehen.

What 'is' important is what lies beyond names and beyond questions.

The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, experienced this realization early in life: "Since boyhood, by repeating my own name silently, an intense awareness of individuality came, then seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this was not a confused state, but clear and sure, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility.

There is no victory over death; there is only the realization of Who we all really are.

Bad people don't go to hell, they are already there.

God is the creature, not the creator.

The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows. But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.

Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

The universe just does not give a shit.

Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the "mountains in the sun"—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.

In the end, it doesn't matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone. Goddamn it hurts.

beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.

Holmes smiled tightly. "I discovered, Mr. James," he said as he leaned closer, "that I was not a real person. I am…how would a literary person such as yourself put it? I am, the evidence has proven to me most conclusively, a literary construct. Some ink-stained scribbler's creation. A mere fictional character.

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God's wide domain would carry the memory

Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective.

In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.

Tempus edax rerum.