Quotes About Being

Being" is far more important than "doing." When we are what we should be inside, we will bring forth fruit.

Allow the resurrected Christ to allocate your time as His own . . . and have complete right-of-way throughout your being.

Joy cannot be pursued. It comes from within. It is a state of being. It does not depend on circumstances, but triumphs over circumstances. It produces a gentleness of spirit and a magnetic personality.

Death is the great argument for immortality. We cannot believe that the living, loving soul has ceased to be. We cannot believe that all those treasures of mind and heart are squandered in empty air. We will not believe it. When once we understand the meaning of the spiritual, we see the absolute certainty of eternal life; we need no arguments for the persistence of being.

Things absolutely necessary to healthy existence were necessarily known from the earliest ages, unless indeed we imagine that the primeval man was created in a state of physical and moral disease, that he might grope and blunder his way into health, as some theorists assert that he groped and blundered his way from a tiger into a moral being, and from a monkey into a man.

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

Success is not in what you have, but who you are.

one of her eyes was lower than the other, which gave her a distinguished look, and if she seemed to squint a little, it was not because she had bad vision but because one of her eyes had simply got stuck while staring beyond the treshold of the infinite into the very center of an equilateral triangle, into the very heart of being, or, as a chatolic existentialist put it, her defective eye symbolized the diamond's eternal blemish.

I no longer felt alone and it gave me, not strength, but a sweet sensation of happiness, though I knew sadness was lurking not far off, because all being arises from nonbeing, and everything that exists derives from its opposite.

We appear in order to have our experiences.

Enlightenment" describes a natural consciousness and presence that is fully awakened to its own true nature. This liberation, as I'll explore in Part Three, feels like freedom, peace, and at times an irrepressible love without conditions. We deeply relax into life, and a way of being unfolds that does not feel at all personal.

Buoyancy, floating, weightlessness. Freedom. These are the words we use to talk about swimming. Is it a coincidence that this is also the language we use to talk about the lightness of being, the wellness of being, that we strive for in this corporeal world?

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.

If necessity is the mother of invention, it is no less the mother of crime; eternal justice is one thing, eternal love of bread and butter and other good things another; where it is a necessity of our nature to have, it is a weakness of our being to get.

They concluded that every suicide can be explained as "an attempt to maintain or enhance the self." The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live.

difference in kind between empirical questions characteristic of science and philosophical questions about the fact of existence itself (a distinction lost on those who think that the universe as a whole, or matter-energy, or anything else that exists, might adequately explain its own being).135

All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, "condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.

He was letting you break your icons one by one. he was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.

Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.

I move, therefore I am.

I'm me, and at the same time not me. That's what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.