Existential Insight Quotes

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.

I don't think there is life beyond death. I don't. But I do believe that we get this clarity in the last minute of our life. The titles we achieved, the honors we managed, they all vanish. You are left alone with you and your deeds and the things you didn't do.

Nothing can match the wonderment that comes from staring up into the star-filled canopy above and realizing that you are a part of that creation.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

You and I are made of stardust. We are the stuff of exploded stars. We are therefore, at least 1 way that the Universe knows itself. That, to me, is astonishing.

She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence.

To really know life you've got to be part of life. You must get down and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence. You have to rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what he is.

We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.

Human life-everybody lives it, but only to a few is it known.

I found the secret of life to be body placement.

Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

Before I traveled my road I was my road.

I always knew I was going somewhere - going out. I just knew. I just knew. I just knew there were a lot more points of view out there.

I learned about life from life itself, love I learned in a single kiss and could teach no one anything except that I have lived with something in common among men.

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!

The end of a life is always vivifying.

Necessity is an interpretation, not a fact.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

Consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn't it the same with life? Doesn't the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, it at all, only at its end, on the verge of death?

It is not true that one cannot live without a woman. It is simply that one cannot have lived without one.

Facing my own death brought an instant sense of clarity and purpose.

Understanding of life begins with the understanding of patterns.