Quotes About Existence

I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.

Brother, try, O Child of Aphrodite, try to die: To die is life.

We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

What a man can't remember doesn't exist for him.

It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.

This means that just when we are comfortable, then we find there is Change. But within us, our ego likes security. Security means constancy in existence, in appearance. Constancy is having. But constancy is not in the world of action. Constancy in the world of action is an illusion. The beingness which we seek cannot be found in appearance. This is because the beingness is in the becoming. The becoming is the essence for it is the pathway toward God.

One way of emphasizing the singularity of the recent past is [..] to observe that the total number of humans ever to have lived is estimated at around (a bit less than) 100 billion. One of Walt Whitman's poems has a memorable image—thinking of all past people lined up in orderly columns behind those living—'row upon row rise the phantoms behind us'. Actually, looking over our shoulder, we would see only around 15 rows.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

The answer is simple: if you cannot find meaning inherent in life right now, as you live it in this visible world, the addition of an infinite amount more of the same isn't about to somehow make it any more meaningful! Add a whole string of zeroes to a zero and watch what happens.

If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

Although an atheist, Pascal said he would make a deathbed confession to God. If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

proving that life had no definitive end, but that it was merely shifted to another plane or dimension.

Because he knew in his very bones that there could be no reason, nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme of a vast and utterly indifferent cosmos.

nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme

No, the reason he didn't fear death was because he had accepted his place—minuscule as an atom, insignificant as a mayfly—in a mystery and a miracle beyond full comprehension.

What none of these faiths—even the Hindu—did was doubt for one moment the existence of dark spirits, or their ability to jump from one living presence to another. Demons were considered parasites, infinitely malleable and indefatigable, hitchhikers of the soul, and as she read,

Every species, from the blue whale to the fruit fly, will struggle, with every fiber of its being, to preserve its own existence. And the more I studied them, even the single-celled diatoms, the more beautiful they all appeared to me. Life is a miracle—an absolute fucking miracle—in every form it takes, and I just never felt right again about taking any of it unnecessarily.

Maybe time was an illusion after all, as some of the latest scientific theories seemed to suggest.

If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning," Kurt said, his head down as he carefully lifted a single strand of spaghetti from his plate, "then there must be such a thing as an afterlife. Otherwise, what is the meaning of this one?" "Oh, Kurt," Adele said, "why must everything have a meaning? Maybe we are just here to eat spaghetti and talk and laugh and," she paused, replenishing her glass and raising it to her host, "drink good wine.

Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme of a vast and utterly indifferent cosmos.

Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small "t." Big "T" Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.

For while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also the case that the unlived life isn't worth examining.