Quotes about Existence

You are what you want to become. Why search anymore? You are a wonderful manifestation. The whole universe has come together to make your existence possible. There is nothing that is not you. The kingdom of God, the Pure Land, nirvana, happiness, and liberation are all you.

Life is a perpetual joy of exploring and living in a continuous state of wonder and awe.

An hour reflecting on one's own non-existence is better than a year of religious devotions with the thought that one exists.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Spirituality means waking up.  Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep.  They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.  They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

    What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'

You can ignore my messages and I can ignore your eyes, but ignorance doesn't make my messages nor your eyes non-existing.

To be really aware you must be able to know simultaneously what is going on thousands of miles away today, what may have happened centuries ago, what will happen anywhere in the world decades from now, and what is occuring, has occured, or will occur on other planes of existence. And you must still act as if you know nothing. You must just sit and talk with other people and play the part which Nature has assigned to you.

Philosophy is speculation, Zen is participation. Participate in the night leaving, participate in the evening coming, participate in the stars and participate in the clouds; make participation your lifestyle and the whole existence becomes such a joy, such an ecstasy. You could not have dreamed of a better universe.

Birth and death are doors through which you pass from one dream to another. Someone is born on Earth in France as a powerful king, rules for a time, then dies. He maybe reborn in India, and travel in a bullock cart into the forest to meditate. He may next find rebirth in America as a successful businessman; and when he dreams death again, reincarnates perhaps in Tibet as a devotee of Buddha and spend his entire life in a lamasery. Therefore hate none and be attached to no nationality, for sometimes you are a Hindu, sometimes a Frenchman, sometimes an Englishman, or an American or a Tibetan. What is the difference? Each existence is a dream within a dream, is it not?

Evolution is the development of the energy of the universe in such a way that it has an increasing ability to consciously control itself and the universe around it. It is a progressive change from the unconscious to the conscious. We are the universe trying to comprehend itself. Man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to control its own destiny. Man is God in the process of coming into existence.

We contemplate that reality in which everything exists, to which everything belongs, from which everything has emerged, which is the cause of everything and which is everything.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
[this quote also appears in Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Chapter 9, p. 28]

I never much liked the concept of inflexible structure in a system.  It always made my skin crawl.  I always felt like it suggested the ommittance of something rather important.
I've finaly realized that the missing "something" is the basis for all existence.

'He's dreaming now,' said Tweedledee:  'and what do you think he's dreaming about?'
Alice said 'Nobody can guess that.'
'Why, about you!' Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly.  'And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?'
'Where I am now, of course,' said Alice.
'Not you!' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously.  'You'd be nowhere.  Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!'
'If that there King was to wake,' added Tweedledum, 'you'd go out - bang! - just like a candle!'
'I shouldn't!' Alice exclaimed indignantly.  'Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?'
'Ditto' said Tweedledum.
'Ditto, ditto' cried Tweedledee.
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, 'Hush!  You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.'
'Well, it no use your talking about waking him,' said Tweedledum, 'when you're only one of the things in his dream.  You know very well you're not real.'
'I am real!' said Alice and began to cry.
'You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked:  'there's nothing to cry about.'
'If I wasn't real,' Alice said - half-laughing though her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous - 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'
'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?'

It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence.

God has created the world to play hide-and-seek with man.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

If God were to exist for the entire humanity, he would be profoundly vile, as he allows the existence of unfathomable sin, stupidity, madness, and misery for no reason than his own despicable enjoyment. God exists though, not for all humanity, but for a one chosen man - a philosopher - who is bound to answer the greatest philosophical question, the question about the nature of the questioner's existence, which progressively quenches the divine vanity.

I know what the world exists for, but I know not how it came into existence. I see the design, but not the designer. I understand the question, but not the questioner.

The reason for human existence is the ultimate philosophical questioner's vanity.

Life is a question asked by God about the way he exists.

For the vast majority of humans, to be a "self" means nothing other than to carry their own claustral cardboard-box of dysculture and rhetorical controls and verbal-perspectival poverty around over their heads, so they can be out and about "in" the world without actually having to be "in" it in such a way that they suffer the chaos of it and are exposed to the rawness of it. Idiotia wants always one-way perception or information or intelligence about the world, like the sunshaded stand-apart or alienated loner who tries to observe without being seen or the sniper who picks his shots without himself being exposed to fire; idiotia wants to know without being known, to stripmine the world and other people of what is useful to him but utterly without any reciprocity or just exchange. Ego overwhelmingly is just a way of getting through life untouched, unscathed, uneducated, i.e. with one's virginal infantilism intact; that is ego's most profound and pious mission, and the whole meaning of its ensemble of monadic-isolationist purposes; except for a very few anomalies across an entire population, "ego" is just the commonplace expression for idiotia. "Existence" for the vast majority of humans is more truthfully the buffering virtuality and technology of anesthesia or euphoria that shields them from actual and naked "existence," the kind of life that is "truth"-based (analogous to "fact-based accounting procedures," as opposed to unctuous and subjectivist hypotheticalisms).

God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.

The question is how the questioner exists.

Thus one should know oneself to be of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss[Sat-Chit-Ananda].

What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.

What matters most is how you see yourself.

Many people will come in and out of your life that will cause you pain, it is your choice to let them continue