Quotes About Existence

But where do we find what's lasting? Where do the deathless things hide?

You're a glass-half-empty kind of guy, sir, aren't you? I don't even acknowledge the existence of the glass, son.

I remember, but you see, that doesn't work for me. I say life is given meaning by context. There are no individual selves. There are only humans embedded in practices, places, cultures.

And to live at all is miracle enough.

Life is fragile, fleeting, and precious. And to live at all is miracle enough.

You know what they say. The living are only a species of the dead, aren't they? And a very rare species at that. The cradle rocks over the abyss.

Without the Lord, the disciple no longer knows who he is.

Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain?

And when someone else speaks your name you feel pleased. You feel wanted. You feel there. Alive. Even if they're saying your name with dislike, at least you know you're you, that you exist.

Belief means willing yourself to give all your attention to living with loving gladness in the world you think really exists.

One could not spend one's life in the imaginings of another life.

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.

We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness.

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we're crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2.

In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way.

Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of the wretchedness of man's situation, and poured scorn on all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.

Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity.

For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence.

Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: I, death, am here, in the midst of life.

The more closely we analyse what we consider 'sexy', the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence. The