Quotes About Existence

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK

Muziek dient ertoe ons eraan te herinneren dat we maar heel kort een lichaam hebben.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

Civilization will fade away, but that will go on forever.

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

It's sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it's a million.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: the problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

With all those places to live? How come nobody's anywhere?

Which is bigger, outer space or inner?

people are more likely to refrain from violence out of preference for a nonviolent existence than they are to do so out of fear of punishment.

Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them.

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

God comes to you disguised as your life

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. —Walt Whitman

I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once.

Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff.

My starting point is that we're already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is

love, not death, is the eternal thing.

We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.