Quotes About Existence

And I thought, Holy fuck, we're not dead. Together. As in not dead yet. Think of all the years we will be. Our bodies turn to caramel. [Naked Man Hides]

You could stand there two hours; you could stand there five minutes. The Pacific didn't give a hoot about time. It would eat a year for breakfast. Is that why they'd always been so drawn to it? Is that why, still, they came and stood at the edge, day after day? Its blessed indifference? [Pacific]

To ensure that we don't merely exist in the dead present? ... That the oblivion of the now as opposed to the ecstasy of looking back--but wait, wait, if the present is the past, you fool, dissolving this very moment--then it is incumbent upon us now, now, to create the past--so obvious! so rudimentary!--it's the uncreated past that is dead [Walt Kaplan/August, Bedroom]

An argument for the existence of a regionalist art that is fully capable of international acceptance, that is fully capable of operating outside the lineal leapfrog of Europe-to-New-York styles, and yet of adding to them.

That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.

Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.

this is not about the mere extension of life along a horizontal plane, but about the deepening of life along a vertical plane. Mere longevity cannot render life meaningful any more than brevity has the power to make it meaningless.

In contrast we let go of existence, meaning, and the sublime as categories to describe the object "God." Instead these become ways in which we engage with the world. Yet, as we affirm the world in love, we indirectly sense that in letting go of God we have, in fact, found ourselves at the very threshold of God.

To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact

If you agree that bringing someone into existence can be bad for that person and if you also accept the argument that bringing someone into existence can't be good for that person, then this leads to a strange conclusion: being born could harm you but it couldn't help you.

La creencia de que existen los animales porque Dios los creó - y que los creó para que podamos responder mejor a nuestras necesidades - es contraria a nuestra comprensión científica de la evolución y, por supuesto, a los registros fósiles, que demuestran la existencia de primates no-humanos y otros animales millones de años antes de que hubiera seres humanos en absoluto».

Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution.

T]his is the land of liberty and equality, where a man sees and feels that he is a man merely, and that he can no longer exist, [except if] he can himself procure the means of support. —Robert Stuart, journal postscript for October 13, 1812, while starving in today's Wyoming, shortly before discovering the South Pass

You're dying to hear what she said. And you will. The three principles are: "One. If something is free to be taken, take it. "Two. Other people exist so that you may use them. "Three. Nothing on earth means anything, or can mean anything, but what it is.

My uncle's town, Milburn, is one of those places that seems to create its own limbo and then to nest down in it.

Despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real.

Nevertheless, in every piece we write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it even as we discover it.

Our lives may take place over decades. But they're made of one long string of present moments like these. Of course, not all of these moments are this memorable, nor do they have to be. But they're all equally real. You're having a present moment right now. Now you're having another one.

The present moment is when everything in your life happens. It's the only real time you ever have. But we miss too many of these moments

Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525)

Those words, Suzuki said, contain the basic truth of existence: Everything is always in flux. Until you accept this, you won't be able to find true equanimity. But to do that means accepting life as it is, not just what you consider the "good parts.

secular people don't believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.

I appreciate life so much after I see people die. It is always just such a reminder that every moment -- this is all we have. This is it. I don't know if there is anything before or after, but this is what we do know. This is it. There are no guarantees for anything else. So we have to always, always appreciate.

This is what fascinates me most: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.