Nonexistence Quotes

Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a roundtable discussion on nonexistence. ~ Caitlin Doughty

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cheerfulness is irritating, but it suits some people. Some people are born for sunlight and orange peel smiles and running on the beach and wild flowers in their hair.

Other people are born for nonexistence. ~ C.G. Drews

The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. ~ Thomas Ligotti

One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it. ~ Joe Haldeman

It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end. Something emerges, though through no aperture - this refers to the fact that it has reality. It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time. There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in - yet in the coming out and going back its form is never seen. This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself. ~ Zhuangzi

The ancient Greeks thought there was no need to count something that was nothing. And since it was nothing, they held that it was impossible to express it as a figure. So someone had to overcome this reasonable assumption, someone had to figure out how to express nothing as a number. This unknown man from India made nonexistence exist. ~ Yoko Ogawa

Nowhere to be touched
or explored,
not here and not in distance.
It's just a tingle that overflows my brightest dreams.
Am I wise or simple-minded to believe
that non–existent evidence
is not an evidence of non–existence? ~ Tatjana Ostojic

For the first time in years, I could see the stars that Thurmond's monstrous lights had faded into nonexistence. They were so bright, so clear that they couldn't have been real. I didn't know what was more shocking–the endless stretch of road or the sky. Tears pricked at the back of my eyes. ~ Alexandra Bracken

This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted. ~ Milan Kundera

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Today it is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Survival and persistence, sung defiantly in the high notes of the diva, are no small feats in a world that wishes fervently for one's nonexistence and/or silent complicity in one's own exploitation. The narcissistic self-regard implied in the negative definition of the diva is a radical insistence on self-love when no one else loves you, when you are not, according to social norms, worthy of being loved at all, but only of being desired in a way that uses you up or consumes you. To say that diva citizenship cannot change the world is to accept a meaning of "the world" that aligns it only with the privileged. An investigation of the real function of diva citizenship has to start by asking who these acts are for, and whether the very fact of having something for herself can change a person, who might then go on to change the world just by surviving in it for one more day. ~ Amy Gentry

The universe is the way it is , whether we like
it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent
of our desires . A world without God or purpose may seem harsh
or pointless, but that alone doesn ' t require God to actually exist. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

At the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man, said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world's unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything. ~ Emil Cioran

The nonexistence of God makes more difference to some of us than to others. To me, it means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs. ~ Bertrand Russell

It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living. ~ Max Frisch

As painful as life can be at times for people all over the world there is some component of existence, or nonexistence perhaps, operating to implement a balance and give us an opportunity to turn the horrors we've forced upon each other into something more conducive to sustaining at least minimal degrees of sanity and love. ~ Aberjhani

Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot. ~ Imre Kertesz

The greatest of fools are those who fail to mark the invisible from the nonexistent. ~ Raheel Farooq

Accepting the nonexistence of being,
when the absence of existence means the negation of being. ~ Marieta Maglas- Eschatological Regression

So the will's desire for death is not a desire for nonexistence, but a desire for peace. When someone wrongly believes that he will not exist, he desires by nature to be at peace; that is, he desire to exist in a higher degree. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.

One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.

'I cannot live with myself any longer.' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. 'Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with.' 'Maybe,' I thought, 'only one of them is real.'

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt draw ~ Eckhart Tolle

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have been so naughted in Thy Love's existence that my nonexistence is a thousand times sweeter than my existence ~ Rumi

But if electrons can exist in parallel states hovering between existence and nonexistence, then why can't the universe? After all, at one point the universe was smaller than an electron. Once we introduce the possibility of applying the quantum principle to the universe, we are forced to consider parallel universes. ~ Michio Kaku

Will," he says, "do you have a sec to talk in the living room?" I spin around in the desk chair and stand up. My stomach flips a bit because the living room is the room least likely to be lived in, the room where the nonexistence of Santa is revealed, where grandmothers die, where grades are frowned upon, and where one learns that a man's station wagon goes inside a woman's garage, and then exits the garage, and then enters again, and so on until an egg is fertilized, and etc. ~ David Levithan

I do like talking with friends about big concepts, you know, the stuff that will ruin a party. To me, the party hasn't begun until we're talking about the nonexistence of God. ~ James Mercer

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE

You come to us
from another world

From beyond the stars
and void of space.
Transcendent, Pure,
Of unimaginable beauty,
Bringing with you
the essence of love

You transform all
who are touched by you.
Mundane concerns,
troubles, and sorrows
dissolve in your presence,
Bringing joy
to ruler and ruled
To peasant and king

You bewilder us
with your grace.
All evils
transform into
goodness.

You are the master alchemist.

You light the fire of love
in earth and sky
in heart and soul
of every being.

Through your love
existence and nonexistence merge.
All opposites unite.
All that is profane
becomes sacred again. ~ Rumi

Indifference is the worst kind of response when love is expressed. Hate is not the antithesis of love; it's the nonexistence of feeling, a pervasive apathy. When hate is present, so is love. It's passion gone sour and fueled by pain, but, nonetheless, it's passion and love is apparently still alive. Yet when indifference seeps into our spirits, an emotional numbness and permitted scotoma takes the place of any passion – whether it's love or hate – and resigns in a new state of being. ~ M.B. Dallocchio

A friend once told me 'The body has nay conscience.' I dinna ken that that's entirely so-but it is true that the body doesna generally admit the possibility of nonexistence. And if ye exist-well, ye need food, that's all. ~ Diana Gabaldon

He saw the white paper as the great universe of nonexistence. A single stroke would give rise to existence within it. He could evoke rain or wind at will, but whatever he drew, his heart would remain in the painting forever. If his heart was tainted, the picture would be tainted; if his heart was listless, so would the picture be. If he attempted to make a show of his craftsmanship, it could not be concealed. Men's bodies fade away, but ink lives on. The image of his heart would continue to breathe after he himself was gone. ~ Eiji Yoshikawa

If we do not know the character of being itself - I have never seen anyone suggest that we do know it - then there is an inevitable superficiality in any claim to an exhaustive description of anything that participates in being. And the assertion of the existence, or the nonexistence, of God is the ultimate exhaustive description. ~ Marilynne Robinson

We have been created as recipients. I look at the stars, at the grass, at my fat-faced children, at my fingernails, and I am oppressed by gratitude
I have been given a belly so that I might hunger. I have been given hunger so that I might be fed.
I look in the atheist's mirror. I look at his faith in the nonexistence of meaning. I look at his preaching and painting. I see nothing but a shit-storm.
Why would I walk through that door? Why would I live in your novel? ~ N.D. Wilson

The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence. ~ William James

Some People

Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something close to all they've got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

What happens quietly: someone's dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone's bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp child back to life.

Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across an oddly reddish river.
Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane seems to circle.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or a longer while.

Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won't be the enemy
and will leave them to some sort of life. ~ Wisława Szymborska

Amaat conceived of light, and conceiving of light also necessarily conceived of not-light, and light and darkness sprang forth. This was the first Emanation, EtrepaBo; Light/Darkness. The other three, implied and necessitated by that first, are EskVar (Beginning/Ending), IssaInu (Movement/Stillness), and VahnItr (Existence/Nonexistence). These four Emanations variously split and recombined to create the universe. Everything that is, emanates from Amaat. ~ Ann Leckie

Thousands and thousands of books are thrown on the market every year
presenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillations
of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. The heroine of Proust requires
several finely-wrought pages in order to feel that she does not feel anything. It
would seem that one might, at least with equal justice, demand attention to a
series of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of human
beings out of nonexistence, transforming the character of nations and intruding
forever into the life of all mankind. ~ Leon Trotsky

Whole areas of knowledge and information have been defined into nonexistence because the system cannot know, understand, control, or measure them. ~ Anne Wilson Schaef

The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone's outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness. ~ Bruce Crown

Return from existence to nonexistence. You are seeking the Lord and you belong to him. Nonexistence is a place of income; flee it not. This existence of more and less is a place of expenditure. ~ Rumi

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. ~ Douglas Adams

One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or "prove") existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to "prove" them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to "prove" existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .) ~ Ayn Rand

By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool's fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe. ~ Thomas Ligotti

But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?"
"Because you're part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn't understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore. ~ R.F. Kuang

In this way I have sat in many rooms and walked in many gardens, and it has been as though I were a stick of furniture or a branch of a tree. I seem to have caused no sense of restraint or embarrassment. People have been able to talk freely in front of me, almost as freely as though I weren't there. I suppose some might think this a great compliment; it has given me a curious feeling of nonexistence. Now ~ Madeleine L'Engle

I'd always worried about being practically empty, about having no serious reason for living. And now, confronted with the facts, I was sure of my individual nullity. In that environment, too different from the one where my petty habits were at home, I seem to have disintegrated, I felt very close to nonexistence. I discovered that with no one to speak to me of familiar things, there was nothing to stop me from sinking into irresistible boredom, a terrifying, sickly sweet torpor. Nauseating. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

The Portal of God is nonexistence. All things sprang from nonexistence. Existence could not make existence existence. It must have proceeded from nonexistence, and nonexistence and nothing are one. Herein is the abiding place of the sage. ~ Zhuangzi

What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

There is no quarrel between science and spirituality. I often hear people of science trying to use it to prove the nonexistence of the spiritual, but I simply can't see a chasm in between the two. What is spiritual produces what is scientific and when science is used to disprove the spiritual, it's always done with the intent to do so; a personal contempt. As a result, scientists today only prove their inferiority to the great founding fathers of the sciences who were practitioners of alchemy. Today's science is washed-out and scrubbed-down and robbed of everything mystical and spiritual, a knowledge born of contempt and discontent. Or perhaps, there are a few who wish to keep those secrets to themselves and serve everyone else up with a tasteless version of science and the idiots of today blindly follow their equally blind leaders. ~ C. JoyBell C.

The nonexistence of absolute rest therefore meant that one could not give an event an absolute position in space, as Aristotle had believed. The positions of events and the distances between them would be different for a person on the train and one on the track, and there would be no reason to prefer one person's position to the other's. ~ Stephen Hawking

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both. ~ Emil Cioran

Atheists are often asked to prove the nonexistence of a nonexistent thing, but religious hierarchies do far better: they abuse you with impunity, and profit from selling you many imaginary benefits of a panoply of nonexistent things. ~ Rian Nejar

It's not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb. ~ Hilary Mantel

THE INTEREST WITHOUT THE CAPITAL

The lover's food is the love of the bread;
no bread need be at hand:
no one who is sincere in his love is a slave to existence.

Lovers have nothing to do with with with existence;
lovers have the interest without the capital.

Without wings they fly around the world;
without hands they carry the polo ball off the field.

That dervish who caught the scent of Reality
used to weave basket even though his hand had been cut off.

Lover have pitched their tents in nonexistence:
they are of one quality and one essence, as nonexistence is. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves. ~ Herman Wouk

The most celebrated pocket borough was Dunwich, a coastal town in Suffolk that had once been a great port - the third biggest in England - but was washed into the sea during a storm in 1286. Despite its conspicuous nonexistence, it was represented in Parliament until 1832 by a succession of privileged nonentities. ~ Bill Bryson

I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial, for when the child is finally allowed
or forced
to recognize the nonexistence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience in maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to her at any given time. ~ Orson Scott Card

If we refuse our homage to statues and frigid images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with which hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not merit praise instead of penalty [Christians were punished for not worshiping Roman gods] that we have rejected what we have come to see is error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those whom we are certain are nonentities. What does not exist is in its nonexistence secure from suffering. ~ Tertullian

Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Yet [134] even though the sense world mimics the divine like a shadow,
and the divine world is self-sufficient and totally independent, still it is
impossible to postulate complete nonexistence for the sensory world, for
the very reason that it does reflect the world of the divine. The destruction
of the world, then, can mean only that it is transformed, not that it goes
out of existence altogether. The Holy Book speaks clearly to this effect in
describing how the mountains will be set in motion and become like tufts
of wool, and men like moths, the sun and moon cast down, the seas split open and spilled out, on the Day when the earth turns to what is no longer
earth, and the heavens to what is no longer heaven. ~ Lenn Evan Goodman

Of everything we must first ask: is it real or not? ~ Mike Klepper

One the grand paradoxes of existence and nonexistence is the uncertainty of uncertainty. Even uncertainty can be uncertain. However, can you be certain of such uncertainty? ~ Lionel Suggs

Oh, there are those who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of irrefutable truth; there are terrible ones, wholly in communion with Satan and his proud spirit. For them hell is voluntary and insatiable; they are sufferers by their own will. For they have cursed themselves by cursing God and life. They feed on their wicked pride, as if a hungry man in the desert were to start sucking his own blood from his body. But they are insatiable unto ages of ages, and reject forgiveness, and curse God who calls to them. They cannot look upon the living God without hatred, and demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they will burn eternally in the fire of their wrath, thirsting for death and nonexistence. But they will not find death ... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To think blankness
rouses certain terror
and in the feeling
the sudden sense
of self responding
down to the smallest
unaided particle
of its existence
as answer to
the blankness of
sure nonexistence ~ Edwin Honig

If my clone weren't dead, or rather not in nonexistence, he would have probably killed me by now. ~ Jarod Kintz

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject. ~ Julia Kristeva

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

I strained to hear a voice from that stone, or grave, as if beneath it were hidden the secret of life and death. I sat on the cliff's edge, above the endless forests and crags and listened to the snakelike hissing of the mountain wind, in a twofold wasteland of loneliness and nonexistence, like the ancient corpse under the slab. ~ Mesa Selimovic

But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring. [...] The truths, the great truths - and most of the lesser ones as well - they are unbearable for most men. We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn't matter, as long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to. [...] We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth. We invent beauty. Faiths, political movements, high ideals, belief in love and fellowship. All of them are lies. [...] Our lies are not perfect, of course. The truths are too big. But perhaps someday we will find one great lie that all humanity can use. Until then, a thousand small lies will do.
(from Way of Cross and Dragon) ~ George R.R. Martin

For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue. ~ Greg Graffin

For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as 'death' is no more than the death of old age ... The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age. ~ Julian Barnes

I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him. ~ Albert Einstein

The business of an animal is not only to reproduce (which is common to all living things), but they all of them also participate in a kind of knowledge (some more, some less, some very little indeed), because they have sense-perception, which is a kind of knowledge. But the worth we assign it hinges on whether we look at it compared with intelligence or with the class of lifeless things. Compared with intelligence it seems like almost nothing to have a share of touch and taste alone, but compared with the absence of all sensation it appears a great thing. For even this form of knowledge would appear a precious thing compared with lying in a state of death or of nonexistence. - Aristotle, Generation of Animals ~ Michael Augros

I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence. ~ Paul Valery

Christianity offers a different vision, the vision of a merciful and loving God, whose "silence" about our sins need not be interpreted as a sign of His nonexistence, but instead as an expression of His patience and readiness to forgive. But ~ Tomas Halik

I think back to Kristen's musings about the nature of existence … nonexistence. Her wonder about who and what her baby was before it was conceived. Now I wonder the same thing. Who was I before I existed. Who am I now that I no longer do? ~ Amy Huntley

When you visit Nirvana, there is neither existence nor nonexistence. Your baggage never arrives because there is no one there to claim it. ~ Frederick Lenz

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. ~ Carl Sagan

As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquieting overtones), so Dreyer's presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. [ ... H]e could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained and empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened - that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The thing is, I don't have the strength to end my life. I have no desire to slit my wrists or OD on pills. I'm too tired. Too lazy. If I could just fade into nonexistence, that'd be perfect. ~ Cheryl McIntyre

You're saying Stevie's problems are because we taught him to believe in Santa Claus?" asked Step, incredulous. "On the contrary. I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial, for when the child is finally allowed - or forced - to recognize the nonexistence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience in maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to her at any given time." "So Santa Claus is good," said Step. "Santa Claus is usually not maladaptive," said Dr. Weeks, ~ Orson Scott Card

Suchness is neither that which is existence, nor that which is nonexistence, nor that which is at once existence and nonexistence, nor that which is not at once existence and nonexistence. ~ Asvaghosa

To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence. ~ David Cronenberg

I don't ever participate in debates about the existence or nonexistence of God because I can't imagine why anyone would be persuaded one way or the other by such things. ~ Susan Jacoby

If you can see something, and it is wrong, you can fight it with a reasonable chance of success. Fighting the nonexistent is worse than pointless: Don Quixote tilted at windmills, but at least windmills are real. ~ Mike Klepper

Gender isn't simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.

Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let's talk about the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn't feel like drag when you're a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn't feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn't feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity, and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let's stop trying to deconstruct gender into nonexistence, and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound, and intricate. ~ Julia Serano

You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless, not worth you. Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence. And still this life parts your lids, you see you seeing your extending hand as a falling wave - I they he she we you turn only to discover the encounter to be alien to this place. Wait. The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. The opening, between you and you, occupied, zoned for an encounter, given the histories of you and you - And always, who is this you? The start of you, each day, a presence already - Hey you - ~ Claudia Rankine

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre