Quotes About Existence

American foreign policy has been - and must continue to be - based on unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist and to be free from terror.

I'm not a luddite. Science, computers, medicine, they're all great. But nature is context. That which we can't control. Its constant mortality and immortality is an answer to the terror of finite existence. It reassures the soul.

I have been defending Israel's right to exist, and to defend itself against terrorism, for many years-on college campuses, in television appearances and in debate.

Israel is now sustaining a war for its own existence. A nation defending its citizens against terrorist bombings and a military and diplomatic onslaught by an array of Arab foes is practicing survival, not genocide.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'

As a species, we've always been interested in what happens when we're no longer around, all the way back to 'Revelations' in 'The New Testament.'

Being, in the testimony it gives of itself, informs us not only about what it is but also about what we owe it.

The main thing is not to be dead.

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms…. Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Where I come from Nobody knows; And where I'm going Everything goes. The wind blows, The sea flows - And nobody knows.

She had said: "How beautiful the world is, Eben. It was never made for anything but beauty — whether we lived now, or long ago." We had that beauty together. We never lost it.

We know so little", I said, "and there's so much to know. We live by taste and touch; we see only what is under our noses. There are solar systems up there above us, greater than our own; and whole universes in a drop of water. And time stretches out endlessly on every side. This earth, this ocean, this little moment of living, has no meaning by itself. . . Yesterday is just as true as today; only we forget.

Once a person exists, not everything compatible with his overall existence being a net plus can be done, even by those who created him. An existing person has claims, even against those whose purpose in creating him was to violate those claims.

We are reluctant to believe that all of what we are gets erased in death; we seam to ourselves deeper than the mere stoppage of life can reach. Yet the writings on "survival" and the evidence for it seem jejune. Perhaps whatever continues is unable to communicate with us, or has more important things to do, or things we'll find out soon enough anyway—how much energy, after all, do we devote to signaling to fetuses that there is a realm to follow?

The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

For whatever you live is life.

Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.

Walls protect, divide, distinguish; above all they abstract . The basic activities that sustain life . . . take place beyond walls.

T]here exists an allegiance between the dead and the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two. - 1959, from a catalogue

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.