Quotes About Existence

histories. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O'Brien names this practice of writing Indians out of existence "firsting and lasting." All over the continent, local histories, monuments, and signage narrate the story of first settlement: the founder(s), the first school, first dwelling, first everything, as if there had never been occupants who thrived in those places before Euro-Americans.

But authorship is not to be denied. Not even if you are Thomas Pynchon and stonewall all attempts to establish your actual existence. My own feeling is that Pynchon does not exist, and neither do the last five hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow, but there is no question whatsoever that Thomas Pynchon is an author.

Religion deals with the highest levels of meaning. As a result, it can interpret each life or each event in a context that runs from the beginning of time to future eternity. Religion is thus uniquely capable of offering high-level meaning to human life. Religion may not always be the best way to make life meaningful, but it is probably the most reliable way.

For twelve hundred years Mullahs have been writing proofs of the existence of God. Believe me, I've taught theology for a long time - none of them is real proof. The only real proof can come through illumination.

One demonstration of the power of the State is the fact that it has so colonized our imaginations as to make itself seem natural, leaving us unable to think of a different way. Yet for the majority of human existence we have lived without the State.

Todo lo que vemos o nos parece, no es sino un ensueño en un ensueño!

El verbo puede crearse su propia carne, como el caracol su concha: pero la carne sola jamás creará al verbo, y como la estatua existirá sin alma.

A ideia de que a medicina é uma luta contra a morte está errada. A medicina é uma luta pela vida boa, da qual a morte faz parte.

Mas a vida humana não se mede por batidas cardíacas ou ondas cerebrais. A vida humana só é humana enquanto existe a possibilidade de beleza e riso. Sem beleza e sem risos a vida humana acabou.

Todo ser é um permanente deixar de ser. A vida acontece morrendo. Como o rio. Como a chama.

A vida é bela. Pare de namorar a morte! Beba a taça até o fim!

Mas a alma não sabe o que é isso, o não existir. Aquilo que é sentido existe. A alma é um lugar assombrado onde moram as mais estranhas criaturas que, sem existirem, existem.

Não há razões para a alegria. Ela é uma fonte da eternidade que emerge no tempo.

a celebração de mais um ano de vida é a celebração de um desfazer, um tempo que deixou de ser, não mais existe.

You are an Universe of Universes and your soul a source of songs.

So this is the human condition: we're living longer, getting taller, and are a push of a finger away from every other person on the planet and yet we do not know how to run ourselves.

Why, if we're still breathing and eating, is there such unhappiness? Dissatisfaction is part of the deal of living because simple existence is full of contradictions; we want individuality, to stand out from the crowd, yet we want be part of a tribe. We're driven and busy and yet we want peace. And worst of all, we want things to stay the same despite the fact that everything changes

You could go through a whole lifetime in your head dreaming of another life, instead of living your own. Steve

Are you alive, do you still exist?

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

When reason has followed its road to the end, the point of crisis is reached and man is brought to the great question mark over his own existence.

That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things.

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.

No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us.