R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

I'm always aware that there are, broadly speaking, two different ways to act: there is acting, and then there's being, and I'm always more interested in that.

Dost thou know what life is, my child? Hast thou comprehended the action of those springs which produce existence? Hast thou examined thyself?

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you.

From ancient times, the core idea of the soul is the soul is the capacity to integrate different functions into a single being or into a single person. The soul is what holds us all together: what connects our will and our minds and our bodies and connects us to God.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I am Walter, a body, but more important than the body is my spirit.

Everyone at a point in their life is struggling to find out who they are and where they belong.

Earth and heaven are in us

My sense of identity broke down and was replaced by something that is very hard to put into words. Awareness, Consciousness.

I know that I exist; the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.

For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

Distinctly different as a child, as an adolescent, in his prime and in his old age, man considers himself as one, not because he acts, but because he knows.

If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you'd best begin with the Little Answers about your body.

Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

Life is a verb, not a noun.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"

Our consciousness, a startling outgrowth of the universe, is possibly its most important part, the fraction of existence that can think, feel, marvel at itself.