Quotes About Existence

What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only one tremendous one.

What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.

But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in this world I know to be true.

What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway—like phantom limbs, he supposed.

This is Lucy." She added, almost playfully, "Lucy comes from nothing." I took no offense, and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.

But here was the world, screeching its beauty at her day after day, and she felt grateful for it.

life picked up speed, and then most of it was gone—made you breathless, really.

Please try to understand this: I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.

People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

This is how we lived. It was strange.

You could buy a snow blower or a nice wool dress for your wife, but beneath it all people were rats scurrying off to find garbage to eat, another rat to hump, making a nest in broken bricks, and soiling it so sourly that one's contribution to the world was only more excrement.

I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible is what I mean.

Please try to understand this: I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say—oh, I don't know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world.

The idea that there might be an afterlife horrified Connie. She had a hard enough time with this one. What if death was a big garbage bag where the body went, but the mind was left to hang on forever, suspended with its thoughts? That was Connie's idea of hell.

I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.

But when I think Oh William!, don't I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don't I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don't know it, that's all.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

But how do we do that? Especially since, as we have seen, the Forms do not exist in time and space, and none of us ever really knows them until we are dead.

For Aristotle, it was man's nature to know things. For Aquinas, to know is to be in an existential sense; to know the world is to be part of the world ourselves. God has put us into the world for a purpose, His purpose. We need to use and understand that world to catch a glimpse of that purpose, and thus a glimpse of God Himself.

The fact that the study of nature proved beyond refutation the existence of a perfect and benevolent Creator was for Newton both exhilarating and liberating.

No, Ockham concluded, there is no common nature shared by individual dogs or men that we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything that is real exists only as individuals. When I say, "All men are mortal," this is shorthand for saying, "Socrates is mortal," "Plato is mortal," and so on.

All forms of humanism, Heidegger proclaimed, lead inevitably to metaphysics, since they presuppose a human being with a fixed rational nature. Instead of freeing man, the humanist view actually reduces Being's infinite possibilities to the dim, stunted creature of the modern age.

Wat is dat toch aan een mens dat het idee dat alles eindig is en uiteindelijk toch zal verzinken in anderhalve kuub aarde hem niet bij voorbaat moedeloos maakt een kort na zijn geboorte al bij de pakken neer doet zitten? ?Japin