Quotes About Existence

Put simply, the cosmological argument claims that since the physical world had to come into existence somehow, there must be a First Cause, namely, a creator God.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

I laughed simply because being this particular person in this particular world at this particular moment was cause for joy...

Tell me how you are." "I'm fine, Mother." "No one is fine. Fine is a placeholder.

She knew her death was near because time had begun to fold like a fan so that the past and the present rubbed together in ways that made her feel supple and porous, as if time were moving through her body and not the other way around.

deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It's something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

Leef is beter as skryf, beter as lees, beter as luister of enige ander tweedehandse ervaring.

What is it about the human face that it should be the most memorable thing in existence and yet its atoms are the quickest to disperse?

Life is absolutely unbearable. And we're going to die.

Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world—or the last.

I believe that life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.

I don't think we have souls. I think death is the end. A lot of people can't bear that idea, but I find it a little restful, really. I'm happy not to feel I'm going on. I don't really want to. I think this life has been plenty. It's just about all anybody could take, really. I'm cheerful about the feeling the end will come -- let it come.

When they faded and Protestant leaders looked around, they recognized that a situation had come into existence that almost none of them had anticipated. That new situation was the presence of separate Protestant churches in separate parts of Europe.

In a word, the basic principle of the Scottish philosophy — that people could reason naturally from the evidence of their own consciousness to the existence of God and the validity of traditional morality — had become very widespread by the early nineteenth century.

Søren Kierkegaard believed that boredom is the root of all evil. I second the notion. Boredom isn't just boring; boredom is wrong. You cannot simultaneously live by faith and be bored. Faith and boredom are antithetical.

we think so much about the present and so little about eternity that we turn eternity into nothing and nothing into eternity.

G. K. Chesterton said that his goal in life was to take nothing for granted—not a sunrise, not a smile, not a flower, nothing. That is a truly wonderful approach to life. Don't take anything for granted. Truly appreciate every minute that you have to live. My near-death experience has helped me be better at that. If I hadn't almost died, I wouldn't have figured out how to live.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.6

There are days when everything feels like a metaphor for your having died There are days when nothing does

Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age; but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.

So the Giver of Death makes use of us and so does the Giver of Life. And these two are irreducibly One. And whoever does not understand this must learn to see with a single eye.

In the grand scheme of things, his existence was not important to anyone but himself

Of course, from an absurdist perspective, all deaths are a punch line: the good news is, you're born; the bad news is, you die. Life is a death sentence.

In the book, he said, the self is fixed, made concrete; the book is the intersection of the soul and time.