Quotes About Existence

Truth is rarely writ in ink; it lives in nature.

The analysis of man discloses three chemical elements — a job, a meal and a woman.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

For authentic living what is needed is the resolute confrontation of death.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.

Thus "phenomenology" means ???????????? ?? ????????? -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.

What was Aristotle's life?' Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: 'He was born, he thought, he died.' And all the rest is pure anecdote.

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.

Union with God is not something that needs to be acquired but realized.

The very simple meaning of what Moses says, therefore, is this: everything that is, was created by God.

a quite novel kind of grammar and logic, according to which what is something is nothing

In all of Holy Writ we find not a single instance of adoration of the patriarchs, the prophets, and apostles - much less of St. George and St. Barbara, who probably never existed, and of the other saints who created by the pope, like St. Francis and St. Dominic, about whom no one knows anything with certainty. But even if we were to concede that they were full of grace, they would still be unable to impart any of it to me.

Thus Augustine says: "We know that we owe our existence to His goodness. We know that we are creatures because of the kindness of God, not because of merit. For it has pleased God that no one should glory except in the Lord.

The question is no longer between violence and non-violence it is between non-violence and non-existence.

Life was nothing but endless torture. He no longer felt any pleasure watching the sun rise, his every waking moment was sour, ruining the taste of anything that could have brought him enjoyment. As he had never really felt that he was living, he was not afraid of death. He was even happy that, in death, he would find the sole proof that he had been alive.

Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path?

The atoms that comprise our bodies and that make all visible stars and galaxies, are mere trace-constituents of a universe whose large-scale structure is controlled by some quite different (and invisible) substance. We see, as it were, just the white foam on the wave-crests, not the massive waves themselves. We must envisage our cosmic habitat as a dark place, made mainly of quite unknown material.