Quotes About Existence

We are born into mystery and we leave life in mystery.

It was one of those times when the unsatisfactory complexity of the world fades far enough into the distance for the moment to become a thing in itself.

Thank God, all you who have a spark of rational piety in your hearts, for the glorious commonplace of earth and sky,—for this cloud-embosomed planet in which you pass your lives.

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.… This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.

Things you know before you hear them -- Those are you, Those are why You are in the world.

Love in the Country We live like this: no one but some of the owls awake, and of them only near ones really awake. In the rain yesterday, puddles on the walk to the barn sounded their quick little drinks. The edge of the haymow, all soaked in moonlight, dreams out there like silver music. Are there farms like this where no one likes to live? And the sky going everywhere? While the earth breaks the soft horizon eastward, we study how to deserve what has already been given us

How did the world ever manage without me before I was born?' he wondered. 'Didn't they feel something was missing?

Life was...sad. And yet it was beautiful. The beauty was dimmed when the sadness welled up. And the beauty would be there again when the sadness went. So the beauty and the sadness belonged together somehow, though they were not the same at all.

Whatever happened I would not, I dared not, become a hostage to grief. Anthony had been my sweet companion for seventeen years, but grieving for myself because he had died was neither tribute nor benefit to him and should not become the purpose or the focus of my existence. …If I allowed this, the power of death would not only have claimed Anthony in the grave but would also seize me – prematurely, or without sufficient pretext.

We shall say without hesitation that the atheist who is moved by love is moved by the Spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies.

She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.

Movement is most of what a bird is. When they're dead, they're only feathers and air.

Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence.

O joy! that in our embersIs something that doth live,That nature yet remembersWhat was so fugitive!

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.

'Tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes!

The unimaginable touch of Time.

Truths that wake,To perish never.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and comet from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.

Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.

A simple child. That lightly draws its breath. And feels its life in every limb. What should it know of death?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting...

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And has the nature of infinity.