Quotes About Existence

Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.

One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society's property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all.

Vitality cannot be given, only found.

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.

infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.

For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the absolutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to human existence but its difference as well.

The homelessness of nature, its utter indifference to human existence, disclose to the infinite player that nature is the genius of the dramatic.

World exists in the form of audience. A world is not all that is the case, but that which determines all that is the case. An audience consists of persons observing a contest without participating in it. No one determines who an audience will be. No exercise of power can make a world. A world must be its own spontaneous source. "A world worlds" (Heidegger). Who must be a world cannot be a world.

Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world.

We are players in search of a world as often as we are world in search of players, and sometimes we are both at once. Some worlds pass quickly into existence, and quickly out of it. Some sustain themselves for longer periods, but no world lasts forever.

The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless.

While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself.

No one conceives a child; a child is conceived in the conjunction of sperm and ovum. The mother does not give birth to a child; the mother is where the birth occurs.

As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player's temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.

For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.

So this is a fundamental problem, being out of a loop that I don't even believe in.

Religion can be defined as a relatively-bounded system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence, and in which communion with others and Otherness is lived as if it both takes in and spiritually transcends socially-grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing.

We are here in a physical world, with physical bodies, because that is exactly where God purposed us to be and where we shall be in the future.

In the Christian world view, having bodies is not a barrier to spirituality but how we live out our spirituality in a physical world.

Most books don't even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.

You look up from an oldish author: Is he dead? Such power we have, not knowing. Let him live.

A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.

In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.