I stick my finger into existence-it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean?~Soren Kierkegaard

"Let us be mortal. Let us contemplate existence." ~Charles Dickens

"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed." ~Blaise Pascal

[This message has been edited by Gene (edited January 18, 2000).]

"Today we all live in despair, all awakened people, and are thus cast between God and Nothingness. Between those poles we breath, sway and pendulate. Each day we are tempted to throw away our lives, but we are sustained by that within us which is suprapersonal and supratemporal. So our weakness — without being heros for that reason — becomes bravery, and we preserve a little of the faith that has been handed down from the past for those who will come after us."

--Herman Hesse

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.
~Les Murray, The meaning of Existence

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
~Charles Baudelaire

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.
~ Aristotle

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.~Alan Watts