Quotes About Existence

We must remember that we do not observe nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods of perception. The theories determine what we can or cannot observe... Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.

The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.

To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other.

A biologia diz-nos que descendemos de criaturas de carne e osso, mas, no fundo, sabemos bem que somos filhos e filhas de fantasmas de papel e tinta.

If the Epic of Gilgamesh carries a teaching, it is that the other makes our existence possible.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.

Can you say something about nothing?

It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.

The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions

Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.

I don't care where I'm from. Nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.

The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.' 'A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,' said the Savage promptly. 'Quite so…

Then you think there is no God? No, I think there quite probably is one. Then why? … Mustapha Mond checked him. But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now … How does he manifest himself now? asked the Savage. Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all.

Here and now, boys.

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.