Quotes About Existence

What are you? Who are you? I thought you shared Artemis's memories. How can you be so stupid? Orion was unperturbed. I share everything. Memories and movies are as real as each other to me. You, Peter Pan, the Loch Ness Monster, me. It's all real, maybe.

Memories and movies are as real as each other to me. You, Peter Pan, the Loch Ness monster, me. It's all real. Maybe.

Anything can be real. Every imaginable thing is happening somewhere along the dimensional axis. These things happen a billion times over with exactly the same outcome and no one learns anything. Whatever a person can think, imagine, wish for, or believe has already come to pass. Dreams come true all the time, just not for the dreamers. Think of something crazy, or if that's too taxing just throw random adjectives and nouns together.

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to.

For I am not Eternity, but a human being—a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day. I must come like the hour, and like the hour must pass!

The gods do not exists, and even if they exist they do not trouble themselves about people, and we have nothing in common with them. The piety and devotion to the gods that the majority of people invoke is a lie devised by swindlers and con men and, if you can believe it, by legislators, to keep criminals in line by putting the fear of God into them.

I want to die, even though I don't have to.

You are a little soul carrying a dead body, as Epictetus said.

you are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

For I am not everlasting, but a human being, a part of the whole as an hour is a part of the day. Like an hour I must come, and like an hour pass away.

People are strange, they neither wish to live nor die.

Goodness exists independently of our conception of it. The good is out there and it always has been out there, even before we began to exist.

You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.

It is not your concern by what means something returns to the Source from which it came.

such is Death, a greater change, from what now is, not to what is not, but to what is not now. Shall I then no longer be? Not so; thou wilt be; but something different, of which the World now hath need. For thou too wert born not when thou chosest, but when the World had need of thee.

Two elements are combined in our creation, the body, which we have in common with the beasts; and reason and good judgement, which we share with the gods.

Having this, then, we must inherit that; destroying this, then that is ended too; no birth, old age, disease, or death; no earth, or water, fire, or wind. No beginning, end, or middle; and no deceptive systems of philosophy; this is the standpoint of wise men and sages; the certain and exhausted termination, complete Nirvâna. Such

In keeping with the exceptionalist vision of nationhood so common in postrevolutionary America, he proclaimed that the founders had put in place a political system more conducive to liberty than any in history. His generation's duty was to preserve this "political edifice" and bequeath it to the future. The greatest danger to its continued existence lay within: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher." Where

Our passionate preoccupation with the sun, the stars and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

Man was nature's mistake—she neglected to finish him—and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

The similarities are many: both mass movements and armies are collective bodies; both strip the individual of his separateness and distinctness; both demand self-sacrifice, unquestioning obedience and singlehearted allegiance; both make extensive use of make-belief to promote daring and united action (see Section 47); and both can serve as a refuge for the frustrated who cannot endure an autonomous existence.

To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the unexamined life is not just less good; it's useless.