Quotes About Existence

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear

We have nothing to live but life itself.

Does awareness play some kind of role as a 'bridge' to a world of Platonic absolutes.

In view of the anomalous relation that consciousness has to the very physical notion of time, as was described at the beginning of this section, it seems to me to be at least possible that there is no such clear-cut 'time' at which a conscious event must occur.

A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health.

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.

People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).

Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.

We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For

To modern man,' Hayek argues, 'the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that law is older than law-making has almost the character of a paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.

he divides metaphysics into three parts – rational psychology, concerning the nature of the soul; cosmology, concerning the nature of the universe and our status within it; and theology, concerning the existence of God.

realities instead.

One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment is that we can form communities without necessaily agreeing on ultimate metaphysical grounds. We know that to a great extent that the principles of social coordination are manmade, we recognise the right of the other to exist. This is something that distinguishes our part of the world from the middle East.

It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.

How can you treat death so lightly? she asks. Because it happens, he replies. It is inevitable. I do not mourn the falling of a leaf or the breaking of a wave. I do not sorrow for a shooting star as it burns itself up in the atmosphere. Why should I?

I wonder as to the value of consciousness," said Jack, "if it does not change the nature of a beast.

Let there be an end to thought. Thus do I refute Descartes.' I sprawled, not a cogito or a sum to my name.

there is Shadow and there is Substance, and this is the root of all things. Of Substance, there is only Amber, the real city, upon the real Earth, which contains everything. Of Shadow, there is an infinitude of things. Every possibility exists somewhere as a Shadow of the real.

Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning.

Much of the world is illusion, yet the forms of that illusion follow a pattern which is a part of divine reality.

Things pass, but the essence remains. You sit, therefore, in the midst of a dream.

What is the true father of a man? The circumstances which brought together the two bodies which begat him? Was it the fact that, for some reason, at one moment in time, these two pleased one another beyond any possible alternatives? If so, why? Was it the simple hunger of the flesh, or was it curiosity, or the will? Or was it something else? Pity? Loneliness? The desire to dominate? What feeling, or what thought was father to the body in which I first came into consciousness?