Quotes About Existence

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

Then he woke up from the dream of humankind.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.

In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being . . . the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos.

Such a small difference, between forever and once.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.

No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.

That's the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego. Maybe it's different in other galaxies. But I doubt it.

There was a planet that couldn't figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

First there was nothing. Then there was everything. Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.

Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.

What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

The tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

I told him what some astronomers now thought: a billion or more planets at least as lucky as ours in the Milky Way alone. In a universe ninety-three billion light-years across, Rare Earths sprang up like weeds.

I've been a man who happily confuses the agreed-on for the actual. A man who has never doubted that life has a meaningful future

You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.

And there's only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been.

leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

all growing things alone disclose the wordless mind of God.

The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits.