Quotes About Existence

Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am.

There seems to be plenty of it,' was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.

But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why... she hesitated. Why one makes such a fuss about things, Anthony suggested. All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self—just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course, he went on, once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss—that is, if you're sensible. Like me, he added, smiling.

Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.

He had discovered Time and Death and God.

Oh, what fun it would be, he thought, if one didn't have to think about happiness.

In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.

There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.

Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.

Life was so short, and books so countlessly many.

The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground

At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively distance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

In the street he drew a deep breath. He was free. Free from recollection and anticipation. Free, for an hour or two, to refuse to admit the existence of the past or future. Free to live only now and here, in the place where his body happened at each instant to be. Free -- but the boast was idle; he went on remembering. Escape was not so easy a matter.

The truth does not cease to exist because it's ignored.

Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.

One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.

When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, 'Four years.' They said, 'How can that be?' He answered, 'I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one's life.'" On another occasion someone knocked at the saint's door and cried, "Is Bayazid here?" Bayazid answered, "Is anybody here except God?

The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.

Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not.

One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.

After all, what is an individual?