Quotes About Existence

But science cannot provide deeply personal answers to your deeply personal questions. It cannot answer those four questions we identified earlier: Who are you? What are you here for? What matters most? What matters least?

As if you could TELL time without injuring eternity.

The realm of immediate or personal knowledge is a narrow circle in which these bodies move the realm of knowledge derived through faith is as wide as the universe, and old as eternity.

Notwithstanding the many variations and exceptions that prove the rule, the common experience of human beings naturally gives rise to a certain shared set of ideas about what we are, how the world works, and how we ought to organize our moral and political existence, or so I will argue. This common consciousness is useful in a limited way for the purpose of making it through the everyday struggles of lives that, in the scheme of things, are not very long or broad.

he had impressed her as a man delightfully open to suggestion, with an imagination large enough to find time, even in the depths of despair, for the important things in life, those accidents without which our existence was little more than a schedule of dry routines.

the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

change, even a tiny one, in the way we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world can significantly change our existence

La felicidad de la existencia es esa plenitud de todos los instantes acompañada de un amor por todos los seres, y no ese amor individualista que la sociedad actual no inculca permanentemente. La verdadera felicidad procede de una bondad esencial que desea de todo corazón que cada persona encuentre sentido a su existencia. Es un amor siempre disponible, sin ostentación ni cálculo. La sencillez inmutable de un corazón bueno.

The world of ignorance and suffering—called samsara in Sanskrit—is not a fundamental condition of existence but a mental universe based on our mistaken conception of reality.

we want to be free of inner suffering once and for all, it is not enough to rid ourselves of the emotions themselves; we must eliminate our attachment to the ego. Is that possible? It is, because as we've seen, the ego exists merely as mental imputation. A concept can be dispelled, but only by the wisdom that perceives that the ego is devoid of intrinsic existence.

the "mindfulness" of Buddhism — can play in the process. Recognizing the emotion at the very moment it forms, understanding that it is but a thought, devoid of intrinsic existence, and allowing it to dissipate spontaneously so as to avoid the chain reaction it would normally unleash are all at the heart of Buddhist contemplative practice.

According to Buddhism, suffering will always exist as a universal phenomenon, but every individual has the potential for liberation from it.

The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.

Pour celui qui a su extraire la quintessence de l'existence, la mort n'est pas une déchéance ultime, mais l'achèvement serein d'une vie bien vécue : une belle mort est l'aboutissement d'une belle vie.

How should I lead my life? How should I live in society? What is knowable?

Buddhism therefore concludes that the self is just a name we give to a continuum, just as we name a river the Ganges or the Mississippi.

In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all.

Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery.

On the Day of Judgment, no step shall a man stir until he has answered questions on five aspects of his wordly existence: his life and how he spent it; his knowledge and what use he has made of it; his wealth, how he acquired it and how he has spent it; and his body and how he has utilized it. HADITH OF AT-TIRMIDHI ON THE AUTHORITY OF ABU HURAYRAH.

The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound.

To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again.

Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.