Best 1828 quotes in «existence quotes» category

What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

What I love about comedians is their instinct is always to go against the grain. Their whole existence is pointing out the elephant in the room. Already you can see audiences are pushing back, but we're the ones who really can take it more than anybody.

What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess.

What makes Existence really nice Is Virtue--with a dash of Vice.

What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

When a person understands what sort of existence a human being is, and what exactly the "self" is, that person has been liberated forever.

When a woman becomes her individual most effective close friend existence is simpler.

When I'm riding my bicycle I feel like a Buddhist who is happy just to enjoy his mundane existence

When one illusion vanishes, another shall appear, and, still leading me forward towards an horizon that retreats as I advance, the happy prospect of futurity shall vanish only with my existence.

When I was young I would ask everybody what life was about. Now it's clear to me that the image of each existence shows its own answer to that question.

Whether I give to a beggar or not, his existence puts me in the wrong.

When selflessness is seen in objects, the seed of cyclic existence is destroyed.

When you know your reason for existence, it should effect the decisions you make.

When you visit Nirvana, there is neither existence nor nonexistence. Your baggage never arrives because there is no one there to claim it.

Why are you so sure parallel lines exist? Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it, or because it is traditional, or because you have imagined it.

Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?-are not questions with an answer but questions that open us up to new questions which lead us deeper into the unshakeable mystery of existence.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

Why do we need to justify God's existence? He exists. We need to justify our own existence.

Yes, I'm often reminded of her, and in one of my array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt - an immense leap of an attempt - to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.

Without aspirations for a better existence, you're stuck in the mud and going nowhere.

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

With the disintegration of all that [Nietzsche] had revered, existence, to him, had become a desert in which only one thing remained, namely that which had relentlessly forced him into this path: truthfulness that knows no limits and is not subject to any condition.

Women are the best. The toughest. The bane of my existence. And I'll forever fall for it.

Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.

You can talk good ideas out of existence.

You cannot describe truly what you are but you can enjoy and directly experience what you are. Therein lies the joy of existence.

You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.

You are my heart, my life, my entire existence.

You don't have to convince Muslims of God's existence or importance.

You can't love anyone or anything until you love your own existence first. Love can only grow out of a respect for your own life.

You ought not be afraid of nuclear, but respectful of it. Yes, it has dangers, but it also has benefits. If not for nuclear, much of the medicine that's saving lives today would not be in existence.

You really get tired in one area of your life, and then you start questioning your whole existence.

Your ability to think is unlimited, and so the things you can think into existence are unlimited.

Your mantra is thank you. Just keep saying thank you. Don't explain. Don't complain. Just say thank you. Say thank you to existence.

Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.

You see everything is about belief, whatever we believe rules our existence, rules our life.

A Brief Awakening In the vastness of the out-rushing cosmos, you are but tiny—a warm and pulsing spark. Against all odds, your birth a brief awakening from silent eons spent sleeping in the dark. When you feel your heart swell with wild wonder at the dazzling diamond chandeliers of night, know your body was built from ancient stardust and the universe now sees through your eyes. So let the breath of sweet gratitude fill you, as the light of each new day begins. For this moment itself is a miracle, and to live it is your privilege my friend.

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

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?

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.

According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe.

A belief in violets isn't necessary for violets to exist.

A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

According to Zen Buddhists, all things have their existence in The Void. The Void is that which is no-thing, but contains all things within it, or as some Christian mystics state, “God is Nothing; He is Utterly Other; He is the VOID.

A farmer can toil harder when a respite is promised at the end of the day and a feat at the end of the year. In the same manner, a human can live ferociously because death is promised at the end. “Teacher, what do you mean by the feat and rest? What is the relationship between?” The teacher answers, “forgetfulness, of every labor and sweats, and of himself in that condition.” Winter becomes bearable by the presence of forthcoming greens, marriage by children, letters by knowledge, urban by nature and canticle by beauty.

A existência inteira, para um homem afastado do eterno, não passa de uma imitação desmesurada sob a máscara do absurdo.

A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.