Quotes About Existence

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

Alice: How long is forever? White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

We change for the good so long as good exists around us.

That idea of time cannot be located in space, though it has endless spatial manifestations, both physical and symbolic.

Destroy the undefinable subjective component, and the whole cosmic process, like the process of time-keeping, becomes meaningless-indeed unimaginable.

Since science opened no path into private and subjective experience, it was forced to deny either its importance or its existence.

To dismiss as non-existent what happens to be indescribable is to equate existence with information. Can a color be described solely in terms of its mathematical determinable wave length? No matter how accurate this abstract description may be, it gives no indication of color as a subjective experience. So with pain. To deny the existence or importance of pain because it is too private to be described-is that an example of scientific objectivity?

Generosity is woven into the fabric of all existence. All living things give and receive all the time. The very act of breathing is a kind of giving and receiving.

You and I are but specks of that rhythmic urge which is Brahma, which is Allah, which is God.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Ghosts are all around us. Look for them, and you will find them.

One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it - in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them - that's huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us.

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

It's not that we use technology, we live technology.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.

There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed.

When part of what you're trying to get at is the truth hidden under a taboo, or when you want to nail a hypocrisy, laughter is a very useful tool. I want to show the painful side of existence, but there is no question I also want to make people laugh.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.