Inspirational Quotes on Existence

“He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren't nonsense, if there was some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke.”

“The light of our life, our sole, eternal, and infinite joy, is simply God - God - God - nothing but God, and all His creatures in Him. He is all in all, and the children of the kingdom know it. He includes all things; not to be true to anything He has made is to be untrue to Him. God is truth, is life; to be in God is to know Him and need no law. Existence will be eternal Godness.”

“In infinite resignation there is peace and repose; anyone who wants it, who has not debased himself by—what is still worse than being too proud—belittling himself, can discipline himself into making this movement, which in its pain reconciles one to existence.”

“If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence, to the flood of life with which He will overflow our consciousness. We have no conception of what life might be, of how vast the consciousness of which we could be made capable. Many can recall some moment in which life seemed richer and fuller than ever before. To some, such moments arrive mostly in dreams. Shall soul, awake or asleep, infold a bliss greater than its Life, the living God, can seal, perpetuate, enlarge? Can the human twilight of a dream be capable of generating or holding a fuller life than the morning of divine activity?”

“I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have.”

“Things here go just as they did with me and my physician. I complained about being out of sorts. He replied, ‘You probably drink too much coffee and walk too little.’ Three weeks later I spoke with him again and said, ‘I really do not feel very well, but now it cannot be because of drinking coffee, for I do not drink coffee at all, nor because of lack of exercise, for I walk all day long.’ He replied, ‘Well, then the reason must be that you do not drink coffee and that you walk too much.’ And so my infirmity was and remains the same, but if I drink coffee the cause of my infirmity is that I drink coffee, and if I do not drink coffee, then my infirmity is caused by my not drinking coffee. And that is how it is with us human beings. All of earthly existence is a sort of infirmity.”

“The thought of death gives the earnest person the right momentum in life and the right goal toward which he directs his momentum”

“Sorrow is a sanctuary as long as self is kept outside. [...] let us not foster, embrace, rekindle and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow is a selfish and luxurious fiction, a ground in which the Holy Spirit will not dig.”

“There must be hope while there is existence; for where there is existence there must be God; and God is forever good nor can be other than good.”

“All this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew which has grown up on a tiny planet.”

“Let a man think and care ever so little about God, He does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him - making life a good thing to him. God gives him Himself, though he knows it not.”