Quotes About Existence

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.7 — C. S. Lewis

Its hard to die. Harder to live

You have to live to really know things, my love

This is the feast of our mortality, the most mundane and human holiday.

The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

We are Energy, trapped in a bag of blood and guts.

Factory jobs never became pleasant. But at least blue-collar work now enabled a middle-class existence, with all its consumption possibilities and lifestyle opportunities.

This sadness wasn't a huge part of me--I wasn't remotely depressed--but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]

I believe that there is something connecting us ... Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we're gone. I've begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness. ... An animating presence .... [pp. 205-206]

And probably every object that we make room for in our life immediately structures that life—the important thing, don't you agree, is to actually acknowledge and experience this fact.

Lifeless with a heartbeat.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes with more a active skin.

I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.

What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.

The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.

How do we know that even the realest of realities wouldn't be subjective, in the final analysis? Nobody can prove his existence, can he?

A permanent present—what a haunting phrase.

Being a football fan entitles us to a temporary, recurring retreat, a short holiday from real existence. Our lives can be in chaos and nothing seem fixed. Nothing except how we feel on a Saturday at 3pm, when we are elevated into blissful and infuriating distraction. What a privilege that is.

He demonstrates that meaning is possible in spite of suffering—indeed, that meaning can sometimes grow from suffering. But he also emphasizes that suffering is not a prerequisite to finding meaning. The search for meaning is a drive that exists in all of us—and a combination of external circumstances and internal will can bring it to the surface.

Here and now is all we got.

Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.

Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.

I know a lot of things, Mathilda. I have gazed through space telescopes into the heart of the galaxy. I have seen a dawn of four hundred billion suns. It all means nothing without life. You and I are special, Mathilda. We are alive.

Each of the humans chests are always rising and falling; and they sway minutely in place as they perform a constant balancing act to stay bipedal.