#Existence

"What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is."

"The stars up there at night are closer than you think."

"You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no . . . anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever . . . lost."

"Follow your heart. It will lead you to where you need to be."

"We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous."

"I'm one of my sensations."

"There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found."

"From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain."

"I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship."

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."[Moral Decay (first published 1937)]"

"You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist."

"Look: the trees exist; the houseswe dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only wepass by it all, like a rush of air.And everything conspires to keep quiet about us,half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope."

"Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him."

"Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with."

"Maybe we all just exist, all versions of us exist at times, and we have to figure out a way to get to each of them, to find each one and tell that version that it's okay, that it's all justthe way it works, a concept too powerful to ignore but too complicated to explain."

"At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down."

"Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions."

"We are all teachers, we all have knowledge and experiences that can teach others."

"You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining."

"Easily mistaken, it is not about a love for adversity, it is about knowing a strength and a faith so great that adversity, in all its adverse manifestations, hardly even exists."