Quotes About Existence

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

sometimes there have been moments when I have perfectly understood the self-portrait called Man Screaming which Egon Schiele painted after his return from Trieste to Vienna, and it has dawned upon me what a nightmare hiatus we all pass through, on the way from birth to death. Surely the only logical response would be to stand on a bridge and scream? But no, self-deception sees us through.

change, the Presence I am steeped in never alters, the Ground of my Being never moves.

Waarschijnlijk omdat de dood de enige ziekte is waar we niet mee besmet hoeven te worden, waarvan we de bacil al vanaf de geboorte bij ons dragen.

Niet bang zijn voor de natuur. Dat is ook maar een natuurverschijnsel.

Leven moet geleefd worden. Je moet er ernst van maken anders ben je een plas die verdampt.

Cats were surly and not required to participate in anything, but managed to convince humans to provide everything they needed. It was the perfect existence for someone like me, who found everyone and everything as suspicious as cats did.

Why are you

Life is an absolute Dream... then I wake up.

The pure power of a life can manifest as beatitude, or as an unspeakable, sheer violence...

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

Is there world enough for me?

We have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species. . . . Environmental responsibility – for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is up to us to put things right.

Her mother was fine. Her mother was always fine. Fine was her way of saying she didn't exist.

Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

There are worlds / in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding. What dissolves will dissolve-- you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.

To feel sabi is to feel keenly one's own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did "infinity in the palm of your hand"—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast.

To remind us of the existence of others when we have fallen into the maze of interior, subjective life is one large part of the work of literature's windows. They keep us from stifling solipsism, by returning the personal self to connection with what is beyond it.

those who follow their own breath will come to know both Being's nature and their own.

An hour is not a house" An hour is not a house, a life is not a house, you do not go through them as if they were doors to another. Yet an hour can have shape and proportion, four walls, a ceiling. An hour can be dropped like a glass. Some want quiet as others want bread. Some want sleep. My eyes went to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R. P. Blackmur said.

The Sanskrit word for this circular chain is samsara. Samsaric existence is endless, so long as we live in ignorance.