Existential Journey Quotes

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to. Don't try to see through the distances. That's not for human beings. Move within, But don't move the way fear makes you move.

I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.

The greatest mystery in life is not life itself, but death. Death is the culmination of life, the ultimate blossoming of life. In death the whole life is summed up, in death you arrive. Life is a pilgrimage towards death. From the very beginning, death is coming. From the moment of birth, death has started coming towards you, you have started moving towards death.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

It's the circle of life, and it moves us all, through despair and hope, through faith and love, 'till we find our place, on the path unwinding.

Life is a wave of creative consciousness rippling through space and time that we have the honor of aesthetically surfing.

We have not merely escaped from something but into something... We have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive.

I think 'The Searcher' is a departure from my first because it's less grounded in religion and is far more rooted in the mythic tradition: more of an existential thriller where the main character is actually the central mystery, and his journey is all about trying to figure himself out.

My favorite movie is 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' with Clint Eastwood, a guy who gets his family killed by the bad guys then goes on a journey of revenge, eventually discovering himself - very existential.

Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.

We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.

And thus ever by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.

Shall we ever see the 10 million things of the universe simultaneously in order to be the all? I am convinced that to live is to travel towards the world's end.

That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.