Existence Quotes - Page 3

A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.

Jerome K. Jerome

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

Barbara Kingsolver

Hopeful visions touch possibilities that only exist in the gaze of the faithful.

Bryant McGill

Sameness of existence. Conformity is inevitable. So is search.

Aporva Kala

No one is ever lost. No one needs to be saved. Open your inner eyes and see it all existing in harmony and love.

Raphael Zernoff

Let your existence be enough for a moment.

Bryant McGill

Rest your mind for a moment in the peace of knowing you were created and you do exist.

Bryant McGill

476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite?For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for you own life, do you ever really exist at all?

Maria Goodin

You don’t know what it’s like to be a man over thirty who’s never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening.

Dave Eggers

There are few things more powerful than a name. A single phrase that somehow becomes a symbol for an entire existence.

Lance Conrad

The bad stuff that is part and parcel of contrived social existence takes a back seat when you concentrate on the heart of Life itself.

Valley Brown

IMPERCEPTIBLE IMPELLENTGod exists in the heart, not in the show of religious alignment

Kamil Ali

Together we'll make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn't so sure.

Ruth Ozeki

Life is always speaking to us at every moment.

Bryant McGill

Time Dreams. They are memories of the soul. They encompass all Time. They exist in the space of a dream.

Tom Stafford

The God who is human in his divinity is the precise opposite of an essence which in ill-willed fashion closes itself to all human thought and knowledge... As love, rather, God is thinkable, without a distinction capable of made between essence and existence. Love is essentially existing lovingly.

Eberhard Jüngel

It’s funny isn’t it? People claim to know what love is — yet the minute they’re given the opportunity to prove it — they bail.Because when I said love — I meant I bled for you. When the word love actually leaves my lips — I’m speaking it into existence. I’m empowering my soul — I’m joining with yours..

Rachel Van Dyken

The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.

C.G. Jung

Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Fay Weldon

Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

Stefan Zweig

So said Tochihuitzin,so said Coyolchiuhqui:We come out of the dream suddenly,we only come to dream,it isn't true, it isn't truethat we come to live on the earth.Like grass in springis our being.Our heart makes them grow,flowers sprout from our flesh.Some open their corollas,then they become dry.So said Tochihuitzin.

Nezahualcóyotl

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

Michel Faber

It's supposed to go bing-bing or bong-bong or ding-ding when tires go over it. The one at Dave's stopped working several years ago, and he won't have it fixed because he feels as I do - that none of us need to be reminded we exist.

Peter Hedges

A truly honorable person, would never convince another to stray, from their personal pursuit of honor. No, only one lacking this noble quality would try to justify and market, an existence without it.

Justin K. McFarlane Beau

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Let me sleep," he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror - this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man's door in her face.Instantly, she raised her hand to knock, discovered the rock... she banged on the door with the rock, but not loudly, just enough to let him know how desperate she was to get back in, but not enough to bother him if he didn't want to answer.He didn't. No sound, no movement of the door. Nothing but the void."Tony?" she gasped, pressing her ear to the door. Silence. "Okay," she said numbly; clutching her rock she walked unsteadily across the porch toward her own living quarters.The rock vanished. Her hand felt nothing."Damn," she said, not knowing how to react. Where had it gone? Into air. But then it must have been an illusion, she realized. He put me in a hypnotic state and made me believe. I should have known it wasn't really true.A million stars burst into wheels of light, blistering, cold light, that drenched her. It came from behind and she felt the great weight of it crash into her. "Tony," she said, and fell into the waiting void. She thought nothing; she felt nothing. She saw only, saw the void as it absorbed her, waiting below and beneath her as she plummeted down the many miles.On her hands and knees she died. Alone on the porch. Still clutching for what did not exist.

Philip K Dick

This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.

Nick Harkaway

He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren't nonsense, if there was some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke.

Aldous Huxley

He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he's not dead.

Álvaro de Campos

Oh, how we could blossom if we didn't have to fight to the death to merely exist!

Bryant McGill

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

Alastair Reynolds

Other times when I hear the wind blowI feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth being born.

Alberto Caeiro

The Jetavana Temple bells ring the passing of all things. Twinned sala trees, white in full flower, declare the great man's certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end:They are as dust before the wind.

Royall Tyler

Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.

Flann O'Brien

I’m in no hurry. What for?The sun and moon aren’t in a hurry: they’re right.Hurrying is believing people can get past their legs,Or that, jumping, they can land past their shadow.No; I don’t know how to hurry.

Alberto Caeiro

My father once told methat there are no gods;only the cruel manipulationsof evil peoplewho pretended that their power was goodand their exploitation was love.But if there are no gods;why are we so hungry to believe in them?Just because evil liarsstand between us and the godsand block our view of themdoes not mean that the bright halothat surrounds each liaris not the outer edges of a god, waitingfor us to find our way around the lie.

Orson Scott Card

Conflict is a natural part of existence. Life is a struggle for survival for every organism at every level.

Bryant McGill

Physical existence is finite.- Sagar Gorijala.

Sagar Gorijala

When I doubt that I exist, I pinch myself.

Dalai Lama XIV

Each day of your existence ready’s itself for your impact

Todd Stocker

It takes time, or does time take it?

Anthony Liccione

There are as many ways of loving as there are people, and that wildflower variety is the great beauty of this dimension of existence.

Jalaluddin Rumi

As I turned over the last page, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among infinite stars? I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.

Louise Glück

I am a thin layer of all those beings on [samadhi level] 3, mingling, connected with one another in a spherical surface around the whole known universe. Our "backs" are to the void. We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. I am one with them; spread in a thin layer around the sphere with a small, slightly greater concentration of me in one small zone. I feel the power of the galaxy pouring through me. I am following the programme, the conversion programme of void to space, to energy, to matter, to life, to consciousness, to us, the creators. From nothing on one side to the created everything on the other. I am the creation process itself, incredibly strong, incredibly powerful.This time there is no flunking out, no withdrawal, no running away, no unconsciousness, no denial, no negation, no fighting against anything. I am "one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping".I am coming down from level +3. There are a billion choices of where to descend back down. I am conscious down each one of the choices simultaneously. Finally I am in my own galaxy with millions of choices left, hundreds of thousands on my own solar system, tens of thousands on my own planet, hundreds in my own country and then suddenly I am down to two, one of which is this body. In this body I look back up, see the choice-tree above me that I came down.Did I, this Essence, come all the way down to this solar system, this planet, this place, this body, or does it make any difference? May not this body be a vehicle for any Essence that came into it? Are not all Essences universal, equal, anonymous, and equally able? Instructions for this vehicle are in it for each Essence to read and absorb on entry. The new pilot-navigator reads his instructions in storage and takes over, competently operating this vehicle.

John C. Lilly

I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The only existence I know now is the one I was given. An echo of what used to be.

Tahereh Mafi

And for the rest of her life, the girl, the woman, she never made a mark on anyone either that proved anything absolutely for certain, that she could ever see, about what she had done at any time, and this does not break her heart."Cloud

Diane Williams

The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself, because the self is the product and a part of the total process of human existence. To transform oneself, self-knowledge is essential; without knowing what you are, there is no basis for right thought, and without knowing yourself there cannot be transformation. One must know oneself as on is, not as on wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and there for fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be. To know oneself as one is requires and extraordinary alertness of mind, because what is, is constantly undergoing transformation, change; and to follow it swiftly the mind must not be tethered to any particular dogma or belief, to any particular pattern of action. If you would follow anything, it is no good being tethered. To know yourself, there must be the awareness, the alertness of mind in which there is freedom from all beliefs, from all idealization, because beliefs and ideals only give you a color, perverting true perception. If you want to know what you are, you cannot imagine or have belief in something which you are not. If I am greedy, envious, violent, merely having an ideal of non-violence, of non-greed, is of little value. The understanding of what you are, whatever it be – ugly or beautiful, wicked or mischievous – the understanding of what you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue is essential, for it gives freedom.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

... And I wondered if we had disappointed God so much, that he wrote us off as pets, just alive to entertain.

Bethany Brookbank

I will say nothing... against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

Aldous Huxley

Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it’s sticking together that’s difficult. Faeces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit: our frenzy to persist in our present state — that’s the unconscionable torture.

Voyage au bout de la nuit

Life is rather a short walk through eternity. Be they seeds, pups or infants, on the trek they all pick up weight, sensitivity and awareness. Then, much before the end of the run, they deteriorate, lead, legs and lungs. The tragicomedy of existence: the long walk of slow decay.

Dagobert D. Runes

If something’s existence is contingent upon the existence of another entity, can we truthfully call them separate beings?

Chris Matakas

You are educated when you learn to coexist with othersAnd as a result you enhance the whole existence.

Debasish Mridha

If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.

David Mitchell

You're born thinking you're the centre of things, and they chip away at that until you expire muttering If I knew then, or some nonsense in an empty rooming house.

Mark Anthony Jarman

It's way too easy to get used to losing, it does something small to you.

Mark Anthony Jarman

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Existence Quotes - Page 3

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