Quotes About Existence

People in tales don't know, always. But there they are.

It's the sensation that all intentionality and will is being drained from the world, all consciousness, that there is nothing in earthly activity but malign blind indifference; that even the willed behavior of persons, speaking, thinking, doing, is only mechanical ticks and tocks. Finally that they cannot even be heard or seen, because all eyes are blind, all ears are stopped. My own consciousness the only one existent to know this.

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?

Mais en réalité, c'est seulement aujourd'hui qu'il le comprend, au moment où il en parle, à savoir que, dans un pays où tout n'est que symbole, on n'a besoin que d'un exemplaire de chaque : un château, un roi, un amoureux, un rival, un enfant, un animal, un poisson, un oiseau, une dent, un Å"il, une coupe, un lit. Tous ne sont que ce qu'ils représentent, et c'est ce qu'ils représentent qui change.

There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit them, no matter how improbable they are. We must ask for the conditional probability of observing constants to take particular ranges, given that other features of the Universe, like its age, satisfy necessary conditions for life.

Natural units tell us that in a well-defined sense the Universe is very old already, about 1060 Planck times old. Life on Earth didn't appear until after the Universe was 1059 Planck times old. We were a late arrival.

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.' Freeman Dyson24

The more simultaneous variations of other constants one includes in these considerations, the more restrictive is the region where life, as we know it, can exist. It is very likely that if variations can be made then they are not all independent. Rather, making a small change in one constant might alter one or more of the others as well. This would tend to make the restrictions on most variations become even more tightly constrained.

For even if we expunged all the matter in the Universe the lambda force could still exist, causing the universe to expand or contract. It was always there, acting on everything but unaffected by anything. It began to look like an omnipresent form of energy that remained when everything that could be removed from a universe had been removed, and that sounds very much like somebody's definition of a vacuum.

If the constants of Nature are slowly changing then we could be on a one-way slide to extinction. We have learnt that our existence exploits many peculiar coincidences between the values of different constants of Nature, and that the observed values of the constants fall within some very narrow windows of opportunity for the existence of life.

Most scientists and mathematicians operate as if Platonism is true regardless of whether they believe that it is. That is, they work as though there were an unknown realm of truth to be discovered.

All we can assert with confidence is a negative: if the constants of Nature were not within one percent or so of their observed values, then the basic buildong blocks of life would not exist in sufficient profusion in the Universe. Moreover, changes like this would affect the very stability of the elements and prevent the existence of the required elements rather than merely suppress their abundance.

there could be more than three dimensions of space but they had to be small and unchanging if they were to avoid altering the character of the world that we experience.

A condition, like the existence of stars or certain chemical elements, is identified as a necessary condition for the existence of any form of chemical complexity, of which life is the most impressive known example. This does not mean that if this condition is met that life must exist, will never die out if it does exist, or that the fact that this condition holds in our Universe means that it was 'designed' with life in mind.

Anselm conceives of God as something than which nothing greater or more perfect can be conceived. Since this idea arises in our minds it certainly has an intellectual existence. But does it have an existence outside of our minds? Anselm argued that it must, for otherwise we fall into a contradiction. For we could imagine something greater than that which nothing greater can be conceived; that is the mental conception we have together, plus the added attribute of real existence.

The name of God is the name of the impossible, and the love of God transports us beyond ourselves and the constraints imposed upon the world by what the Aufklärer called "reason" and Kant called the conditions of possibility, transporting us toward the impossible. Today, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are all dead but God is doing just fine, thank you very much.

The question that preoccupied the Fathers was not to know if God existed or not - the existence of God was a "given" for nearly all men of this period, Christians or pagans. The question which tormented entire generations was rather: *how* he existed. And such a question had direct consequences as much for the Church as for man, since both were considered as 'images of God'.

The future doesn't exist. It hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist. It has already happened.

We've come into this life fully equipped as a buddha, an awakened being, and we'll go out fully equipped as a buddha, realized or not.

When we realize the ground of being, we take responsibility directly, because what we realize is that what we do and what happens to us are the same thing.

Your life belongs to what you have awakened to.

Reality doesn't exist for you. You exist for reality.

I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I'm an atheist. [Letter to Max Otto]