Quotes About Existence

I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.

Gentlemen did not always live up to their ideal, but the existence of an ideal is a matter of supreme importance.

It was the old tale retold, that to the life of every man there is a background

So close—the Infinitesimal and the Infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn't it?

The man who enters Cosmic Consciousness is really a new creature, and all his surroundings "become new" - take on a new face and meaning.

The Now is not an ultimate state to be realized but rather a continuum to be lived.

That is, you can't get outside the present to make it an object of thought.

The thing about being dead, Mr. Lehman, is that there's no future in it.

I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

forever: 23 percent something mysterious that they call dark matter, 73 percent something even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4 percent the stuff of us. As one theorist likes to say at public lectures, "We're just a bit of pollution." Get rid of us and of everything else we've ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. "We're completely irrelevant,

We all arrive on Earth with a round-trip ticket.

From our first babblings to our last word, we make but one statement, and that is our life.

All things are possible with God." "And if there is no God?" Enele turned back. "Then we're just dust and beasts, and what does it matter?

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.

Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all

But there is a danger that we might begin to think of the encounter with God as if it were something radically distinct from our ordinary activities. In fact, we Catholics believe that in Jesus Christ, God rendered the whole of human existence holy. Because of Jesus we should expect to find the sacred not merely juxtaposed to our ordinary lives on a separate, supernatural plane, but in the midst of our ordinary human activities.

Ontology is more like a playground than a science.

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have … "an ambition of transcendence

Human beings need to be made happier, but they do not need to be redeemed, for they are not degraded beings, not immaterial souls imprisoned in material bodies, not innocent souls corrupted by original sin.

Anything is possible, but only a few things actually happen.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

Epictetus, I think, said not to be concerned with death, because life is the presence of feeling and emotion and awareness, and death is the absence of all of that, which means you won't have any awareness. So why worry about it ?

Nineteenth-century nationalism established what we might call the modern ground-rule for having an identity. You have the strongest identity when you aren't aware you 'have' it; you just are it. That is, you are most yourself when you are least aware of it