Quotes About Existence

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest.

If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone?

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break.

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

No one know precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear, and in any case the road builders had more important things to worry about, but this much is clearly established as scientific face: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die.

If you wish to see it as it should be seen, don't wait - there's little time. How do you get there? Well, I couldn't tell you.

The shock of the real.

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and brush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock.

The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know.

I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

It's only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truck driver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.