Existential Inquiry Quotes

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

Either you're a person wondering if you have a soul, or you're a soul who knows that being a person isn't real.

I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range greater than man's. How then can man form any definite opinions about himself?.

I don't know who I am but you know, life is for learning.

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

I think life's too complex to be an accident.

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life

I kind of feel, in a way, all of us will forever be asking those questions of ourselves: Who am I and how do I fit in in the world and what is all this about? Because those aren't really... there are no answers to those questions, in a sense.

You won't discover the limits of the soul, however far you go.

If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting. But I would also say that I'm interested in getting myself to believe that it's going to happen to me. I'm interested in it, because if you're not, you're nuts. It's really de facto what we're here to find out about.

A Russian child asked his mother : "does God know we don't believe in Him?"

Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody's human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we're living in, and everybody's living according to a story.

I already had the sense that I was someone who was more spiritual than specifically religious. ... I'm really interested in those things that are more far-reaching than culture, nationality, race, religion.

How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out - and we have only just begun.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

The height of all philosophy is to know thyself; and the end of this knowledge is to know God.

I am not into any religions. I have been mostly influenced by Eastern religions - Taoism, the essence of Hinduism and Buddhism. But my belief is not having any beliefs.

Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.