Quotes About Existence

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Do you think things always have an explanation? Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.

My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

but BEing time is never wasted time. When we are BEing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from the normal restrictions of time.

For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

I have never lived before...Until this summer, I did not know what it was to be alive.

To grow up is to find the small part you are playing in the extraordinary drama written by somebody else.

Man is; it matters to him; this is terrifying unless it matters to God, too, because this is the only possible reason we can matter to ourselves....

For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.

matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance.

When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, seta against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.

Madeleine L'Engle

Do you think things always have an explanation?" "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Yet there are times when for no logical reason I feel an almost unbearable sense of isolation. Not only am I divided in myself, my underwater and above-water selves separated, but I feel wrenched away from everybody around me. This is part of being human, this knowing that we are all part of one another, inextricably involved; and at the same time alone, irrevocably alone.

William James wrote: "Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.

But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

We human creatures can make watches and clocks and sensitive timing devices, but we don't understand what we're timing.

Have you ever thought about time? The continuum that connects the dust of the ancients to the pollen that lands on our noses? Have you ever looked and thought...that thing needs a wrinkle in it?

Not so much of dying, if—I'm afraid of annihilation. Of not being.

I do hope I wasn't born in some dreadful mitochondrion which lives in some horrible isolated human host on a lonely planet like yours.