Quotes About Existence

Small wonder how pitiably we love our home, cling in her skirts at night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile, when every star strikes us sick with the fright: do we really exist at all?

I believe nothing. Nothing whatever.

At moments I wonder whether those who go, as I do, for a Full Life, don't get their exact reward, which is that The Full Life is full of crap.

To own your life is hardly good Unless you own your livelihood: To own your livelihood's as bad If, in exchange, your life is had.

For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.

We have even lost any critical insight we may once have had into the organic basis of perception, taking for granted the basic fact that a normal person has two eyes. We have nearly ceased to consider this as even knowledge at all and are no longer conscious of our own participation in perception. Instead, we feel a complete passivity in the face of a power that is independent of us; a power we call "existence" or "reality.

So here is the paradox, freedom is dependence upon God. It is a paradox, but it is absolutely clear. The human being – the concrete human person, me, you – once we were not, now we are, and tomorrow will no longer be: thus we depend. And either we depend upon the flux of our material antecedents, and are consequently slaves of the powers that be, or we depend upon What lies at the origin of the movement of all things, beyond them, which is to say, God.

Indeed, as we have seen, God is the most immediate implication of self-consciousness.

The truly interesting question for man is neither logic, a fascinating game, nor demonstration, an inviting curiosity. Rather, the intriguing problem for man is how to adhere to reality, to become aware of reality.

don Giussani toccava cose che ci riguardano in quanto uomini: le nostre preoccupazioni quotidiane, i nostri bisogni, le nostre perplessità e dubbi.

Il cuore dell'uomo, autocoscienza del tutto

insomma, come tutto

3 REALTÀ E RAGIONE

la fede c'entra con la realtà quando cambia l'io nella sua mossa dentro la realtà; e in questo senso la fede si chiama memoria.

Allora, come lo si guarda? Lo si guarda guardando il permanere della sua persona nel tempo e nello spazio, cioè la memoria di Lui. Si chiama memoria il contenuto tangibile, sensibile, visibile di una cosa che è incominciata nel passato e rimane anche adesso.

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have… the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality (one for each and never the same for everyone) which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.

The capacity for deluding ourselves that today's reality is the only true one, on the one hand, sustains us, but on the other, it plunges us into an endless void, because today's reality is destined to prove delusion for us tomorrow; and life doesn't conclude. It can't conclude. Tomorrow if it concludes, it's finished.

And the air is new. And everything, instant by instant, is as it is, preparing to appear. [...] This is the only way I can live now. To be reborn moment by moment. [...] I die at every instant, and I am reborn, new and without memories: live and whole, no longer inside myself, but in every thing outside.

Do you recognize perhaps, also you, now, that a minute ago you were another?

Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist.