Quotes About Being

This is IT! This is the furthest yet! Who can reach it? I can comprehend the absence of Being But who can comprehend the absence of Nothing? If now, on top of all this, Non-Being IS, Who can comprehend it?

True solitude is a participation in the solitariness of God—Who is in all things. Solitude is not a matter of being something more than other men, except by accident: for those who cannot be alone cannot find their true being and they are less than themselves. Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death.

What Zen communicates is an awareness that is potentially already there but is not conscious of itself. Zen is then not Kerygma but realization, not revelation but consciousness, not news from the Father who sends His Son into this world, but awareness of the ontological ground of our own being here and now, right in the midst of the world.

He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some "thing" alien to himself. And he proves that the "thing" exists. He convinces himself: "I am therefore some thing." And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a "thing," an "object," like other finite and limited objects of our thought!

OUR discovery of God is, in a way, God's discovery of us. We cannot go to heaven to find Him because we have no way of knowing where heaven is or what it is. He comes down from heaven and finds us. He looks at us from the depths of His own infinite actuality, which is everywhere, and His seeing us gives us a new being and a new mind in which we also discover Him.

Therefore each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art.

If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being.

humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power.

Soul' is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves.

Because we are made in God's image, in fleeing from a relationship with a loving God, we are also running from being our most authentic selves.

Heaven isn't a place, Fanning!...Why does everyone assume it's a destination - some cerebral version of Grand Central Station? It's a state of being! The unshakeable certainty of who you are and where you fit in the world! The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune aside, we suffer most when we try to be someone or something we're not." (page 220)

Kabir I recently came across: "…just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things, and stand firm in that which you are.

So I really did stop and change what I saw I was about, and really try to put that principle into play as the center of everything - my friendships, my marriage, my career, my family, my way of being in the world. And that changed everything for me.

legs frantic, adrenaline firing through every fiber of my being.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." The only quote I could dredge up by the French priest-philosopher.

home is less a location than a discipline. It is a way of being, a domestic, considered attention to familiar routines and the small, essential details of everyday life. From now on, I promised myself, home would be wherever I was, not the place that I one day hoped it to be. I would create it by being present. I would try to do better.

The existence of God is not logically necessary, and yet, on the basis of some profound peculiar empirical order in the universe, it seems that He exists as the ultimate uncreated Being, implying a paradox, as no logically unnecessary entity can be uncreated. This paradox is the ultimate question asked by God, who is nothing but the ultimate questioner.

The question is how the questioner exists.

Art will never leave me and never should. So as I go into the next part of the trip I hope it will be more creative and more work involved and less talk and more doing, seeing, learning, being, loving, feeling, maybe less feeling, and just work my ass off, 'cause that, my friend, is where it's at!

It's great to be here. It's great to be anywhere.

just to show he can. He just likes being contrary, and likes the attention.

We come to this work because the alternative, being consumed by the effort to ignore the mystery of being, is no longer acceptable.

Creativity is the strongest example of the dynamic nature of intelligence, and it can call on all areas of our minds and being.