Quotes About Existence

The Great Malevolence had been squatting in the blackness for a very long time. He was there billions of years before people, or dinosaurs, or small, single-celled organisms that decided one day to become larger, multicelled organisms so they could, at some point in the future, invent literature, painting, and annoying ring tones for cell phones.

His old identity has been discarded, and his new identity is to be found only on the screen. In the expanse between these two poles lies the reality of the self.

Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth. —Anonymous, "The Seafarer

he had more days behind him than ahead.

But the question that consumed him most was its nature, for he believed that men created gods as much, if not more, than gods created men. If this old god existed, it did so because there were men and women who permitted it to continue to exist through their beliefs. They fed it, and it, in turn, fed them.

Life will stop, but time will go on.

Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, books had no real existence in our world. Like seeds in the beak of a bird waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. they lie dormant hoping for the chance to emerge.They want us to give them life.

If the 'I' is understood strictly as we have been taking it, then it is quite certain that knowledge of it does not depend on things of whose existence I am as yet unaware; so it cannot 28depend on any of the things which I invent in my imagination.

One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

Life is short and the number of books is appalling.

What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world?

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.

We have at any rate one advantage over Time and Space. We think them whereas it is extremely doubtful whether they think us!

Time was ," it said. "Time is ," it said. "And time will —"    But the burning meteor then fell upon it, and neither it nor what destroyed it was ever seen again.

And yet, though we wake, though there is no end to waking and saying Oh I see, not ever [...], still within the dream in which we find ourselves every other dream is nested, every one we have awakened from.

only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!

What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

Circumference = nowhere; center point = everywhere.

A streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?" "Everybody always wonders that. I don't think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that." She took a black man of Alice's. "What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all.

I know that things can't stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?

Houses made of houses within houses made of time.

Are you, or are you not? Have you the taste of your existence, or do you not? Are you within the country or on the border? Are you mortal or immortal? —Parliament of the Birds 'I want a clean cup,' the Hatter interrupted. 'Everyone move one place.' —Alice in Wonderland