Quotes about Existence

Wherever men exist, in all ages and in all parts of the world, they have some form of religion. The idea of God is impressed on every human language. And as language is the product and revelation of human consciousness, if all languages have some name for God, it proves that the idea of God, in some from, belongs to every human being.

Child, you listen to me, and you look me straight in the eyes when I'm talking to you. I may be just old hired help, and a country woman to boot, but I'm a human. And you know what? God thought of me. He actually took the time to dream me up. I may not be much to look at, but what you see first started in the mind of God, so don't stand there and ignore me like I don't exist. You remember that." Miss

Breakfast, dinner, tea; in extreme cases, breakfast, luncheon, dinner, tea, supper, and a glass of something hot at bedtime. What care we take about feeding the lucky body! Which of us does as much for his mind? And what causes the difference? Is the body so much the more important of the two? By no means: but life depends on the body being fed, whereas we can continue to exist as animals (scarcely as men) though the mind be utterly starved and neglected.

"Mystery" referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it.

The beautiful is the radiance which something gives off simply because it is something, because it exists.

The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God's transcendence and God's immanence;

It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light's sake.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is—not his essence, or what he is.

The Christian must hold that all created being, whether substance or accident, comes from nothing and therefore stands far below God's being in dignity;

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity. Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

In the union of person and existence are forced to draw together, and from the same depths of being—which is more than all intelligible essence—arises the invitation of a personal God to his created child, an event that belongs to another realm altogether than all the in-built natural orientations—however mystical—of intellectual beings.

This speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.