Existence

"The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another."

"We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance."

"Man is confronted with two obvious facts: The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself."

"If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can."

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter."

"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

"Every morning I wake up with the news of bloodshed. I feel my body, desperate to know whether I’m still alive."

"An uneasy rhythm of life is more life like than an easy death"

"I asked none why life ends in ways uncertain."

"Human being is the most complicated chapter of existence"

"Existence is a mystery, and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation."

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

"Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence."

"It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs."

"Real intelligence must be fiercely capable of investigating every aspect of existence, including the very process of knowledge that we call science."

"All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All pervading Vishnu, whose nature is Existence-Intelligence; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold."

"Life could not be lived wet, whether it be in rain or tears."

"Life doesn't end just because someone leaves."

"Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects must be the result of philosophic consideration; what philosophy has to achieve in this respect is analogous to what the abolition of slavery achieved in affirming the worth of the individual human being."

"To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is…the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence."

"You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative."

"The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence."

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternatives who might, except for luck, be in our places."

"Man’s basic anxiety … drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. … Horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety. … But ultimately the attempts to transform anxiety into fear are vain. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself."

"Life is a wave which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles."

"All things are just like that-they do not exist, yet do not not exist. And that they do not exist, yet do not not exist, is exactly what the Buddha teaches."

"One important reason for studying philosophy is that it deals with fundamental questions about the meaning of our existence."

"One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying."

"I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a 'theory of everything' that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realized that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with him, but until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific. The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist."

"‘Growth of God’ signifies the existence of God, or at least the existence of something you might call divine, however, unlike ancient conceptions of God."

"Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence."