Quotes About Being

It is the conditional nature of life that gives rise to the concept of need. If a being were indestructible—if it were not confronted with the alternative of life or death—it would have no needs. The concept could not be applicable to it. Without the concept of life, the concept of need would not be possible.

O Father in Heaven—if Thou art still my Father—what is this being which I have brought into the world?

In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.

Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair, till eventide.

We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world!

And all because we longed for healing and happiness—as if happiness is a state of being. But it's not. Happiness is a vector. It's movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you're moving away from pain.

we longed for healing and happiness—as if happiness is a state of being. But it's not. Happiness is a vector. It's movement.

I wouldn`t want the return of crime, but I do tire of we scythes being the sole purveyors of fear. It would be nice to have competition.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, need not even exist.

The most prostituted being, the Being par excellence, is God, since He is the supreme friend to every individual; since He is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.

sometimes it does not take a man or a woman, only something alive

We are simply a part of the machinery of the moment.

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one organic being to another being, been perfected?

The only moment that we exist is the moment we inhabit.

That's essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.

Living Zen is nothing special: life as it is. Zen is life itself, nothing added.

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are.

Zazen is actually not complicated. The real problem is, we don' t want to do it. If my boyfriend begins to look at other women, how long am I going to be willing simply to experience that? We all have problems constantly, but our willingness just to be is very low on our list of priorities, until we have practiced long enough to have faith in just being, so that solutions can appear naturally. Another mark of a maturing practice is the development of such trust and faith.

When we're engaged in pure activity, we're a presence, an awareness. But that's all we are. And that doesn't feel like anything. People feel that the so-called enlightened state is flooded with emotional and loving feelings. But true love or compassion is simply to be nonseparate from the object. Essentially, it's a flow of activity in which we do not exist as a being separate from our activity.

I don't have an end game. Being a celestial being, I live for the moment to fight the Great War, and that is to light the darkness.

I think it's really important to live in the moment.