Quotes About Existence

We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real.

What business had she to try to capture life and light?

It seems to me like a failure of language that experience fits into a regular sentence made up of ordinary words. It fits into one word. Experience.

My personal struggle is to get beyond thinking I'm not worth caring about. I am here. I do exist. Maybe by adding my two cents I can help other moms who feel the way I do. Maybe they will find someone who cares. —

It is always now

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.

Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self.

We have this kind of shibboleth which says: what wasn't reasoned into existence can't be reasoned out. The truth I think is rather much closer to this: that people are making desperate efforts, rather heroic efforts, to be reasonable, to have a coherent worldview, and when those efforts become too costly or too embarrassing… dogma loses.

Not even in the right ballpark"? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball.

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling "I," and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.

Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity.

The only proof that it is like something to be you at this moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.

Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life.

Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found.

I invite you to try to think of a source of value that has absolutely nothing to do with the (actual or potential) experience of conscious beings. Take a moment to think about what this would entail: whatever this alternative is, it cannot affect the experience of any creature (in this life or in any other). Put this thing in a box, and what you have in that box is—it would seem, by definition—the least interesting thing in the universe.

There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.

What you are calling "I" is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.

Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. It is all that can be seen and that which does the seeing. No matter how far you have traveled from the place of your birth, and however much you now understand about the world, you have been exploring consciousness and its changes. Why not do so directly?

We are spawn of woodland apes. No code has been undone. Neither faith nor reason will deliver us. We must look to the trees.

Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.

Death is the period at the end of a sentence. Someone gone, but still out there, is an ellipsis...or a question to be answered.

Most people believe that gods exist. Many do not; this does not trouble the gods, who know that if gods, in turn, were to not believe that people exist, people would actually cease to exist. Mortal belief does make gods stronger; it inflates their egos, which is always good for the metabolism.

All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it