Quotes About Existence

Contar una cosa del pasado comporta también contar una historia del presente. Volver a contar una fantasía, un relato de cosas imaginarias, equivale a volver a contar un relato sobre lo existente.

And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

Meaning was the frame human beings placed around the chaos of being to give it shape

and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.

The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves.

Philosophy, he jeered, was incapable of proving the existence of God, or even of proving the impossibility of there being two gods. Philosophy believed in the inevitability of causes and effects, which was a diminution of the power of God, who could easily intervene to alter effects and make causes ineffectual if he so chose.

People didn't like [my persistent existence]. Because I should have died. Now that I've almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each I,...contains a similar multitude. To understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

It has been estimated that 50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realizing that she was pregnant. In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.

We are not self-caused little gods.

Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.

The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself.

We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn't exist.

One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion

Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.

Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion--even if I'm a brain in a vat, all my memories are false, and my perceptions are of a world that doesn't exist, I'm still having an experience.

There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

I take seriously the idea that we're in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it's not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it's that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There's a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality.

there is no divine purpose, only a plurality of human purposes.