Quotes About Existence

Though it may be the peculiar happiness of Socrates and other geniuses of his stamp, to reason themselves into virtue, the human species would long ago have ceased to exist, had it depended entirely for its preservation on the reasonings of the individuals that compose it. Par 1, 36

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

God and the world are not two things to be added together. Neither are they two things that are 'really' one thing. They exist in an asymmetrical relation in which one depends wholly on the other, yet is fully itself, made to be and to act according to its own logic and structure.

I don't want to be a PULSATING PIECE OF PROTOPLASM!

Life is not a rerun, we don't have stunt doubles or understudies, we're it. The universe doesn't happen to us, we are the universe happening. It actually matters what we do.

we are not humans from the start; we need to become human. Toward this end, we need the insight "that only we are responsible for ourselves, that accusations that we have missed our life's calling can be directed only at us, not some higher powers". We are in no need of the delusion of a supernatural world, because the very task of becoming human is the truly colossal achievement.

Wir werden einen Satz wie Die Welt ist die Selbstverwirklichung Gottes nicht widerlegen, indem wir etwa zu beweisen versuchen: Die Welt ist nicht die Selbstverwirklichung Gottes. Damit würden wir, wo die Metaphysiker den Bock melken, das Sieb unterhalten.

You can get an idea of human nature only when you can see the relationship of the individual human being to the whole cosmos.

We want to be aware that physical existence is a continuance of the spiritual, and that what we have to do in education is a continuation of what higher beings have done without our assistance. Our form of educating can have the correct attitude only when we are aware that our work with young people is a continuation of what higher beings have done before birth.

She is intensely human, and lives to look upon life.

and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true—solidly

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

for by the roadside trundled the very Wheel itself, eating, drinking, trading, marrying, and quarrelling—all warmly alive.

So some of him lived but most of him died. (The Vampire)

You are born, you are a he or a she, and you live until you die... Willy-nilly.

Funny,' said Harriet to herself. 'The world goes on turning, and it has all these troubles in it.

In me you exist,' says the house.

love, for instance. Everybody experiences it, craves it, requires it for his or her very existence, knows it's there. But no one can explain it, break it down into physics and chemistry.

believes in God the way he believes in politicians-he knows He exists but doesn't count on Him for anything.

I remember thinking you live from moment to moment and the moments all flow into one another forwards and backwards and you almost never catch one like this that's separate from the rest.

We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another's light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.

The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living.

Biology doesn't matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn't matter, they said, because God's time is different and superior to man's anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you've been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places.

Looking at them words going down on this paper right this minim I know there aint no such thing there aint no only my self you all ways have every 1 and every thing on your back.