Quotes About Existence

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

How do I explain a life that has lasted for billions of years? It is almost as if I must start with an apology for being alive when everyone I once knew is dead.

You learn the stuff of your life (sports, movies, traveling) ... that's not the essence of your existence, my relationships were always good. Now they have transcended (rise beyond).

We're all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I'm concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.

at the end of the day, human beings are products of nature, and if humans have purposes, then at some level purposefulness must arise from nature and therefore be inherent in nature … Might purpose be a genuine property of nature right down to the cellular or even the subcellular level? (p. 121–2)

uncaused cause, or to use Aristotle's famous expression, an Unmoved

1.2.2 Hylemorphism In change, there is, again, both the potential that is to be actualized and the actualization of that potential.

Hence there must not only be something by virtue of which the thing you've drawn is triangular, but also something by virtue of which it is triangular in precisely the imperfect way that it is. There must also be something by virtue of which triangularity exists in this particular point in time and space.

One famous implication of this doctrine is that though we distinguish in thought between God's eternity, power, goodness, intellect, will, and so forth, in God himself there is no distinction between any of the divine attributes. God's eternity is his power, which is his goodness, which is his intellect, which is his will, and so on. Indeed, God himself just is his power, his goodness, and so on, just as he just is his existence, and just is his essence.

For example, whereas the natural sciences are concerned with various specific kinds of material substances Ã¢â'¬â€œ stone, water, trees, fish, stars, and so on Ã¢â'¬â€œ metaphysics is concerned with questions such as what it is to be a substance of any kind in the first place. (Is a substance a mere bundle of attributes, or a substratum in which attributes inhere? Are material substances the only possible sort? And so on.) Similarly, the natural sciences are concerned with

As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, "those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.

Third, the intellect abstracts from even the quantitative features and considers only the most general ways in which a thing might be characterized Ã¢â'¬â€œ in terms of notions such as that of substance, attribute, essence, existence, etc.

Striking from the CalendarUnborn Tomorrow and dead Yesterday.

Think, in this batter'd CaravanseraiWhose Portals are alternate Night and Day,How Sultan after Sultan with his PompAbode his destin'd Hour, and went his way.

That inverted Bowl we call The Sky,Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die.

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,Before we too into the Dust descend;Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!

"While you live,Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return."

There was the Door to which I found no Key;There was the Veil through which I might not see.Some little talk awhile of Me and TheeThere was—and then no more of Thee and Me.

As Chamberlain was coming to realize, his ability to withstand the hardships of army life and disregard its hazards meant that his current existence, so different from his life in Maine, tapped a psychological need. Growing in him was the suspicion that he was a soldier by nature and that bivouacs and battlefields were his homes.

What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.

I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.   Eventually

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga -- stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.