Quotes About Existence

Life is an incurable disease.

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.

We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.

Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.

To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be…

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.

Neither Heaven nor Hell. It is simply Purgatory.

How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic." p 108

Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or flea that lived on the bodies of men. If...there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened.

All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?

it was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380

The minutes we spend watching the waves don't count against our life spans

IBELIEVE IN BLACK HOLES. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death, lest for forget, is the common lot.

What did it matter? We are dying while we are living. We are old even when we're young. We are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.

we are merely renting these bodies of ours. You came into this world on an in breath. You will exit on an out breath. Hence, we say that someone has . . . ? 'Expired'!

What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.

You see: light escapes from a body at night and in the morning, despite the oppressive vacancy of her leaving's shadow, light comes up over the mountains and it is and it is and it is.

Annie Dillard once wrote, "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing." I think about this a lot when I'm planning my day and what sort of pleasure I might suck out of its marrow during these tumultuous times of constant upheaval and war. Sometimes that means noticing even the most mundane of tasks in order to know we are alive, that we are living.

Perhaps we are hurtling our bodies towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time...

Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.

People love to make big pronouncements about poetry saving us. And I want to believe that, but for now, what I can say is … poetry can make us feel. And right now, maybe that's enough. It doesn't have to bring us hope or joy, it just has to remind us that we feel. That we are alive, and here, and feeling the world.