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Existence Quotes
"In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience."
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"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."
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"Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part."
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"Before you were born, and were still too tiny for the human eye to see, you won the race for life from among 250 million competitors. And yet, how fast you have forgotten your strength, when your very existence is proof of your greatness."
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"There's always been some moron-who usually went by the name of 'producer' - who would have to justify his existence, and interfere."
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"To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself."
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"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us."
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"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?''Yes' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
1
"The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes."
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"You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all."
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"From the beginning, man could look up at a vast universe dotted by innumerable stars to find every evidence that he was nothing. This evidence only grows stronger as science and technology record an expanse of galaxies filled with planetary solar systems beyond any visible end. Man is but a grain of sand lost on an endless seashore, and yet he believes with conviction in his own greatness. He is either a divine soul intuitively aware of his inherent, limitless potential-or he is a blind fool."
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"The world's existence is with common intent. No one has ownership of it. One may do whatever suits him. You cannot criticize him; you cannot say, 'This is wrong'. You cannot even think it. Everything is under nature's management."
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"We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine."
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"Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure."
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"In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil."
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"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."
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"Good! the creature echoed. "Doctor Nelson will be along in a minute. Feel like breakfast?All symbols were in Smith's vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not "feel like food. Nor had he any warning that he might be selected for such honor."
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"A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition, you cannot hear him but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show and you wonder why he is alive."
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"To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence."
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"To be a plain means to die for a mountain; to be a mountain means to die for a plain! Thus, to kill a mountain, make it plain; to kill a plain, make it mountain!"
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"We live in the shadows of perception. Our dull awareness gives us no useful clues as to why we are here."
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"There is simply nothing of comparable value to life."
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"A person seeks to quantify their existence. Do we measure a person's life by its longevity or by assessing the warmth of its blaze? Do we measure a person by their brainpower or by the heartiness of his or her spine? Do earthy deeds count for more than intellectual opinions? What is more important, the work that a person produces or the quality of life that effuses from their being? Does it matter how we live and how we die, if we love or hate, are kind or mean, generous or stingy? Does it matter that we struggle to express personal doubts and toil in an effort to obtain redemption for our personal lapses?"
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"He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree."
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