existential exploration Quotes

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

I think, living in America, we're so bombarded with God all the time that in certain ways I'm making statements against that bombardment, you know? I think it's crazy. I mean, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in anything. But I still think about it. And I still write about it.

Lovers think they are looking for each other, but there is only one search: wandering This world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here there is no dogma and no heresy.

You are an ocean in a drop of dew, all the universes in a thin sack of blood. What are these pleasures then, these joys, these worlds that you keep reaching for, hoping they will make you more alive?

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend

You have to work out where your place is. And who you are. But we're all spirit. That's all we are, we're just walking dressed up in a suit of skin, and we're going to leave that behind.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

We wanted to more richly experience why we were alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of things. The great thing that came from those that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late sixties and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of Philosophy.

Call the world if you please "the vale of soul-making." Then you will find out the use of the world.

I sometimes feel that I'm impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race. I know this sounds sick, but I love it.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

We all need that experience of forgetting who you are. Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience and so frightening that we're in this conflicted predicament.

A new conception of life cannot be imposed on men; it can only be freely assimilated. And it can only be freely assimilated in two ways: one spiritual and internal, the other experimental and external.

I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world.

It sounds to me, young one," Haddek said, "that you are searching for something that cannot be found." "The truth?" Sazed said. "No," Haddek replied. "A religion that requires no faith of its believers.

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

In meditation, once you are gone in, you are gone in. Then, even when you resurrect you are a totally different person. The old personality is nowhere to be found. You have to start your life again from abc. You have to learn everything with fresh eyes, with a totally new heart. That's why meditation creates fear.

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.