Quotes About Existence

It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

isn't the years that matter, Adam. Time doesn't run that way. Life's quick and then it's slow and then there are grey spaces where it really doesn't seem to run at all.

Strip the veneer, and the world had moved only a couple of steps from the cave.

Platonist view of mathematical ideas: that mathematical truths 'really' exist, but they do so in an ideal form in some sort of parallel reality, which has always existed and always will.

My philosophy is this: Do not live for the day – that would be materialistic – but treasure the day. Most of us live on the skin, on the surface, without realising how wonderful it is simply to be alive at all.

Monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism.

I call the PAEI the Textbook Manager because one finds him only in textbooks.1 At this point, what should be clear is that no one person behaves like a PAEI. The textbooks that describe management assume a perfect person who does not exist.

Nos comimos el tiempo, nos rechina su arena entre los dientes.

The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis, is a false person, which has no true reality.

When humility is exercised, people begin to realise that they do not, as it were, exist at all.

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature

Many people who are in reality dead are walking in the streets; many who are in their graves are in reality alive.

The existence of relative truth does not prove the non-existence of universal truth.

P: ¿Cuál es el error fundamental del hombre? R: Pensar que está vivo, cuando simplemente se ha dormido en la antesala de la vida.

Sufism, in one definition, "is" human life.

As Ibn Arabi says: 'Absolute existence is the source of all existence'.

The process of learning is the process of discovering what really exists.

Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.

Nosotros y todas nuestras existencias son no-entidades. Tú eres el ser absoluto cuya apariencia es transitoria.

Sufism was formerly a reality without a name: now it is a name without a reality.

The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.

Voz en la noche Anoche, una voz me susurró: "¡No existe tal cosa como una voz susurrando en la noche!