Quotes About Existence

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

The criminality added a certain spice to an otherwise stultifying existence in an utterly boring location.

The human person, the human being, is not just an object among objects, not just a thing in the world. The human being is a being-in-the-world, a being-with-others, a being-for-others.

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—for that is the meaning of your life.

God can be addressed, but not expressed.

As I actualize, I uncover.

No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.

Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.

Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals.

Spirit is not in the I but between I and You.

Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists - that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.

Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.

I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed.

The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one's whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one's whole being.

That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don't you know also that God needs you—in the fullness of his eternity, you? How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—for that which is the meaning of your life.

Creation does not merely take place once in the beginning but also at every moment throughout the whole of time.

For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality—neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades.

True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.

The third (sphere in which the world of relation arises): Life with spiritual beings. Here the relations is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We hear no You and yet addressed; we answer - creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth. Bt how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word that lies outside language?

There is a light over every person, and when two souls meet, their lights come together, and a single light emerges from them to feel the universal generation as a sea, and oneself as a wave in it.