Quotes About Existence

The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.

Supposing you knew -- not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition -- that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real -- as real to the mind.

This realization is the first of many awakenings that have shaped my understanding of what religion means: Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.

WE ONLY KNOW two things for certain: "I am," and "I will die.

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn't here. Before that, my parents weren't here. And before that…

And I wake, in the cage of my bones, on the same cold ground.

This is the nature of social existence. We talk in order to impose limits, to contain the world in a narrow frame.

As a lifetime proposition, happiness is a discipline, no doubt; but for moments at a time, it's a piece of luck. A piece of luck and a clue: a hint, not just of what might be, but of what already exists, in the heart of a man's heart...

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns von der Gegenwart distanzieren, weshalb wir niemals ganz der Realität der Dinge habhaft werden, machen sie die Vergangenheit zur absoluten Fiktion.

This girl - this thin, cold child in a hand-me-down cardigan and faded dress - hated me, not for anything I was or had done, but because I existed, in her world, and she didn't want me there.

Where logic seems apparent: in bullfrogs or Black-Eyed Susans bird migrations patterns on the skin of newt or carp we go too far imagining a god of purposes.

We are rooted to the air through our lungs and to the soil through our stomachs. We are walking trees and floating plants.

I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.

Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars....

Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.

War is fundamental. A man's views on war tell you the basic axioms of his view on life.

The first step is to measure what can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which cannot be measured, or give it an arbitrary quantitative value.This is artificial and misleading.The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured really is not very important.This is blindness.The fourth step is to say that what cannot be measured does not really exist. This is suicide.   I'm

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition.... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

John C. Polkinghorne

Focusing consciousness without thought into this dark and powerful center of being felt like stepping into a Jacuzzi of joy, and I recalled the ancient Hindu equation sat-chit-ananda, which roughly translates to existence, consciousness, bliss. It is all one and I am that – the incomprehensible and ineffable bliss of being. In

In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. —The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 183

We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.