Quotes About Existence

La vie est une routine et la routine est la résistance à l'émerveillement.

Knowledge of God is knowledge of living with God. Israel's religious existence consists of three inner attitudes: engagement to the living God to whom we are accountable; engagement to Torah where His voice is audible; and engagement to His concern as expressed in mitsvot (commandments).

It is in deeds that man becomes aware of what his life really is

Technical civilization is man's conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time. But time is the heart of existence.

To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care.

Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in.

Conceptual thinking is adequate when we are engaged in an effort to enhance our knowledge about the world. Situational thinking is necessary when we are engaged in an effort to understand issues on which we stake our very existence.

These three ways correspond in our tradition to the main aspects of religious existence: worship, learning, and action. The three are one, and we must go all three ways to reach the one destination. For this is what Israel discovered: the God of nature is the God of history, and the way to know Him is to do His will. To

There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.

To most of us a person, a human being, seems to be a maximum of being, the ceiling of reality; we think that to personify is to glorify. Yet do not some of us realize at times that a person is no superlative, that to personify the spiritually real is to belittle it? A personification may be both a distortion and a depreciation.

The body without the spirit is a corpse; the spirit without the body is a ghost.

Freedom does not mean the right to live as we please. It means the power to live spiritually, to rise to a higher level of existence.

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

With mindfulness you can see the real owner of things. Do you think this is your world, your body? It is the world's world, the body's body. If you tell it, Don't get old, does the body listen? Does your stomach ask permission to get sick? We only rent this house; why not find out who really owns it?

How this is possible is, first, by being, literally, several in a single body. "We are twelve in my body. We are packed like sardines." In other words, the being that I am exists each time in several modes—or, let us say, several beings, which, although sometimes mutually exclusive, are nevertheless inside one another.

In this respect, to convert is to locate oneself in a particular temporality and duration. This duration is that of the inexhaustible future constituted by the infinite, the time of eternity, the time that inaugurates divine existence and its extension in the redemption of the body; thus its final point of completion—if there is one—is the parousia.

If one is not a human being, what is one?

Alles zerfällt im Augenblicke, wenn man nicht ein Dasein erschaffen hat, das über dem Sarge noch fortdauert. Um wen bei seinem Alter Söhne, Enkel und Urenkel stehen, der wird oft tausend Jahre alt.

Ya??yorlar. Ac? çekiyorlar. Ölüyorlar.

People want electrons to orbit atoms like tiny planets, hard and regular. They make sense that way. People like that....they don't want their electrons to exist only as a cloud of potentialities. But that's what we've got now, and we're stuck with it. Quantum mechanics isn't going to roll over and die as easily as God did.

Those macho attitudes include many admirable things: a genuine love of courage, a surprising readiness to celebrate failure if it is bought with bravery, an unsparing sense of the fatality of human existence, a love of the small pleasures that ennoble it.

Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better?

These are the two possibilities for human life.

Nature is not cruel, it is simply indifferent