Quotes About Being

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

Indeed, what could God be if His being could be circumscribed, let alone demonstrated by human dialectics and ratiocination?

The most powerful force in the world is not a weapon or a nation but a truth: that we are spiritual beings, and that freedom is "the soul's right to breathe."

First of all, be what you are.

Je crois, je suis sûr que beaucoup d'hommes n'engagent jamais leur être, leur sincérité profonde. Ils vivent à la surface d'eux-mêmes, et le sol humain est si riche que cette mince couche superficielle suffit pour une maigre moisson, qui donne l'illusion d'une véritable destinée.

How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now, and there will never be a time when it is not now.

The real question is why is there "being"? The existence of existence is amazing, awesome.

Laughter puts your brain, your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble; how hopeless the outlook; how muddled the tangle; how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person.

The first need of being is endurance; to endure with gladness if we can, with fortitude in any event.

The most important thing in our lives is what we are doing now.

Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.

We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

I is who I is.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?

It is what you are inside that matters. You, yourself, are your only real capital.

If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

Forget the past and live the present hour.

Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow wood. Only today does the fire burn brightly.