Quotes About Existence

Only by being useful or talented, and receiving external recognition, would I achieve personhood. I couldn't imagine a world where I was a worthwhile person by dint of mere existence; I felt like I needed to earn it and prove it every day. Don't worry, this feeling went away after only several decades.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.

Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.

Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.

You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.

As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways

Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit — the cosmos?

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways....Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life.

Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question, Why was it made? goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself.

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways....Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life. -from the essay Yellowstone Park

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and our of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were Gods' ways.... Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life.

Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.

Every man knows he will die; and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of sane being.

It's strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you alone.

Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. ... It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance.

It was Kierkegaard who said that life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.

The wonder of an object is that it is not a thought. A thing is first and foremost itself. An inconsequential pebble picked up on the side of the road has preceded us by anything up to four hundred million years, and its face will be brightened still further by rain that will fall here thousands of years after we have vanished. We might change things in the world, yet the most minimal, seemingly insignificant object outlasts us.

IT IS STRANGE TO BE HERE. THE MYSTERY NEVER LEAVES YOU alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.

Each of us is a secret envoi of the earth. We

From time immemorial it has been one of the deepest longings of the human heart to strain against the erosion of one's life, to find a way of living and being that manages to find some stable ground within time, a place from where something eternal can be harvested from our disappearance. This is what all art strives for: the creation of a living permanence.

At a deeper level, time is but eternity living dangerously.

The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing.

There is a period between each night and day when one dies for a few hours, neither dreaming nor thinking nor tossing nor hating nor loving, but dying for a little while because life progresses in just such a way.

The entire sum of Creation, each private and individual act of nature, is God waving hello.