Quotes About Existence

So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night...

Why have You made us the saddest animal? (...) He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can't continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He's a pretty good fellow.

We were late among the living.

I have never seen the Lord God. But I have seen Absalom alive in the tree.

We were late among the living, and by the time God got to us ice was already slipping from the poles as if from an imperfectly decorated cake.

For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement.

Such a person has no place. He can't be found. He's like one of those unphysical things they talk about in science now–like one of those things that's moving, you know, always moving on, but through no space.

Still, the days were endurable and came and went like breath with only a few deep heaves to harm the pace.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)

Quantum physicist John Wheeler expressed it this way, when discussing the search for the clockwork mechanism that runs the world, "There may be no such thing as the 'glittering central mechanism of the universe' to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.

I Think, Therefore, You Are

By convention sour, by convention sweet, by convention colored; in reality, nothing but Atoms and the Void.

In other words, atoms and elementary particles and matter itself all are probabilities and possibilities, to which we ourselves give form.

Does quantum physics really say, he asked, that the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it? He found the idea that matter was described by probabilities especially upsetting. "God does not play dice with the universe!" he declared. To which Bohr supposedly replied, "Albert, don't tell God what to do.

The atoms or the elementary particles are not real," Heisenberg said. "They form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

Physicist Pascual Jordan added, "We ourselves produce the results of measurement." And, by extension, he meant reality itself.

La realidad externa es una realidad, pero nada más que superficial; en un nivel más profundo la verdad es que todo el universo, animado o inanimado, es un estado constante de devenir, de surgir y desaparecer. Cada uno de nosotros es, de hecho, una corriente de partículas subatómicas en cambio constante, junto a las cuales los procesos de consciencia, percepción, sensación y reacción cambian todavía más rápidamente que el proceso físico.

El Buda comprendió que nuestro sufrimiento no es un mero producto de la casualidad, sino que tiene una causa, como la tienen todos los fenómenos. La ley de causa y efecto —kamma— es universal y fundamental a la existencia. No hay causas que caigan fuera de nuestro control.

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

I could yet always feel that it was infinitely better to be than not to be. THE

But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.

That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.