Quotes About Existence

When People talk of the Freedom of Writing, Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he's lived in the state his whole life, replies, "Not yet.")

Am I th'abandon'd orphan of blind chance; Dropt by wild atoms in disorder'd dance? Or from an endless chain of causes wrought? And of unthinking substance, born with thought?

The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.

There are many modes of thinking about the world around us and our place in it. I like to consider all the angles from which we might gain perspective on our amazing universe and the nature of existence.

the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. (...) we would seem forced to say that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. The universe does not 'exist, out there' independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe

Recent decades have taught us that physics is a magic window. It shows us the illusion that lies behind reality—and the reality that lies behind illusion. Its scope is immensely greater than we one realized. We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.

For wisest ends this universal Power Gave appetites, from whose quick impulse life Subsists, by which we only live, all life Insipid else, unactive, unenjoy'd. Hence to this peopled earth, which, that extinct, That flame for propagation, soon would roll A lifeless mass, and vainly cumber heaven.

Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

All things seem mention of themselves And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents. Hugely, spring exists again.

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

We might realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which will resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won't in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.

How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.

You and IAre suddenly what the trees tryTo tell us we are:That their merely being thereMeans something; that soonWe may touch, love, explain.

We never live long enough in our lives to know what today is like. — John Ashbery, from "The Improvement," And the Stars were Shining (Noonday Press, 1994)

You meant more than life to me. I lived through you not knowing, not knowing I was living.

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

The instant is not in time -- time is in the instant.

I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air?

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

The essence of a religious approach to the world, it seems to me, is to be found, not in the imposition of theological dogma, but in the recognition of what is actually there.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)