Premortal Existence Quotes

He was handsome and strong, but somehow that wasn't enough for him. He also felt the need to be tough and inured to hardship... But how was he to come by that quality in this luminous garden, where all manner of fruit was to be had for the picking? ~ Michael Ende

What do you suppose it means?' he asked. ' "Do what you wish." That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don't you think so?
All at once Grograman's face looked alarmingly grave, and his eyes glowed.
'No,' he said in his deep rumbling voice. 'It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult.' ... 'It's your own deepest secret and you don't know it.'
'How can I find out?'
'By going the way of your wishes, fro one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want.'
'That doesn't sound so hard,' said Bastian.
'It is the most dangerous of all journeys.'
'Why? Bastian asked. 'I'm not afraid.'
'That isn't it,' Grograman rumbled. 'It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there's no other journey on which it's so easy to lose yourself forever.'
'Do you mean because our wishes aren't always good?' Bastian asked.
The lion lashed the sand he was lying on with his tail. His ears lay flat, he screwed up his nose, and his eyes flashed fire. Involuntarily Bastian ducked when Grograman's voice once again made the earth tremble: 'What do you know about wishes? How would you know what's good and what isn't?' In the days that followed Bastian thought a good deal about what the Many-Colored Death had said. There are some things, however, that we cannot fathom by thinking about them, but only by experience. ~ Michael Ende

The Restoration began with the prayer of a 14-year-old boy and a vision of the Father and the Son. The dispensation of the fulness of times was ushered in.The Restoration of the gospel brought knowledge of the premortal existence. From the scriptures, we know of the Council in Heaven and the decision to send the sons and daughters of God into mortality to receive a body and to be tested (see D&C 138:56; see also Romans 8:16). We are children of God. We have a spirit body housed, for now, in an earthly tabernacle of flesh. The scriptures say, 'Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?' (1 Corinthians 3:16). ~ Boyd K. Packer

There are long periods when life seems a small, dull round, a petty business with no point, and then suddenly we are caught up in some great event which gives us a glimpse of the solid and durable foundations of our existence. ~ Queen Elizabeth II

The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Anxiety comes into existence only when we become identified with small things. And they all pass. ~ Rajneesh

Some of those whose existence you wish could end now do not even know about your existence. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness. ~ Eugene Thacker

When on the created level of existence man thinks God's thoughts after him, that is, when man thinks in self-conscious submission to the voluntary revelation of the self-sufficient God, he has therewith the only possible ground of certainty for his knowledge. When man thinks thus he thinks as a covenant creature should wish to think. ~ Cornelius Van Til

Say you're bored. Or you can't sleep. Maybe your mom is yelling at you, or the boy/ girl you like doesn't like you back in the same way, or you're too fat to even consider going to prom. Or the closet person to you since you were babies in the cradle together has killed herself. The usual stuff. Dread not. Don't be depressed. Be a junkie!
You can't count on people to nurture you through the trauma that is existence. But you already knew that.
Start by drawing the shades in your bedroom. Welcome the darkness. Lift the pill from your nightstand, clutch the water glass in your hand. Offer your divine thanks in advance. Be greedy-swallow the pill whole rather than spit it in half to spread the wealth for a later date. Dilution is wasteful. Savor the wholesome wholeness.
Now lay down in bed. Close your eyes.
Wait.
Just a little longer. ~ Rachel Cohn

The Mutakallemim ... apply the term non-existence only to absolute non-existence, and not to absence of properties. A property and the absence of that property are considered by them as two opposites, they treat, e.g. , blindness and sight, death and life, in the same way as heat and cold. Therefore they say, without any qualification, non-existence does not require any agent, an agent is required when something is produced. ~ Maimonides

There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes. ~ Evan Parker

Nirvikalpa Samadhi means that you've gone off the board; you've gone off the map. There is no way to describe it. You have attained liberation and are no longer bound by the cycle of existence. You just are, and yet you're not, at the same time. ~ Frederick Lenz

And rural nature is full of the same quickening spirit-it is, in fact, the exhaustless mine from which the poet and the painter have brought such wondrous treasures-an unfailing fountain of intellectual enjoyment, where all may drink, and be awakened to a deeper feeling of the works of genius, and a keener perception of the beauty of our existence. For those whose days are all consumed in the low pursuits of avarice, or the gaudy frivolities of fashion, unobservant of nature's loveliness, are unconscious of the harmony of creation ~ Thomas Cole

The echo is a gift, passed on to us by our ancestors many ages ago, to remind us of ourselves. To confirm our existence. To remedy our loneliness. Though we must be still in order to hear it. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.



I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloo ~ Michael Chabon

Relationship is a mirror in which I see myself as I am; but as most of us do not like what we are, we begin to discipline, either positively or negatively, what we perceive in the mirror of relationship.

"If you recognize the illusion then you can, by putting it aside, give your attention to the understanding of relationship. But if you seek security in relationship, it becomes an investment in comfort, in illusion - and the greatness of relationship is its very insecurity. By seeking security in relationship you are hindering its function, which brings its own peculiar actions and misfortunes.

When insecurity creeps into dependency, as it inevitably does, then that particular relationship is cast aside and a new one is taken on in the hope of finding lasting security; but there is no security in relationship, and dependency only breeds fear. Without understanding the process of security and fear, relationship becomes a binding hindrance, a way of ignorance. Then all existence is struggle and pain, and there is no way out of it save in right thinking, which comes through self-knowledge.

As long as the mind merely uses relationship for its own security, that relationship is bound to create confusion and antagonism. Is it possible to live in relationship without the idea of demand, of want, of gratification? ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. ~ Alan Watts

I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief. ~ Dan Barker

He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn't like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn't like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence. ~ Ben Okri

What makes you come alive? What keeps you going ? Is there hope in your heart still or has the weariness of the world attached itself to you like a limpet leaving you afraid and passionless? Do you wake up with a smile and stars in your eyes after restless, feverish soul-searching in the night? Do you dream, dream beyond what is possible and beyond the narrow confines of your jaded existence? How old do you feel? How much in love can you fall? How much step is there in your dance, o how many notes left in your song ? Have you decided to sit by and watch others dance or weep at the dying notes of your own swan song?

Shake your lethargy. Come alive to innocence once more. Believe past your own jaded cynicism. Pretend you are young once more. Jump up with a spring in your feet, fall breathlessly in love again. Let the colors of the world wash over your walls, brushing the greys away. Let the sunlight of hope flood through your doubting self, o let the music play.

Dance till you ache and drop, laugh till you cry. Sing till your lungs burst, and journey till the very road ends and dream by the moonless starless nights. Sleep with a secret smile on your lips, your body flush with the imprints of lips. Come alive, my dearest ...reclaim yourself from the living dead.

Life beckons ~ Srividya Srinivasan

We are not wrong, perhaps, to be heedful of justice in the midst of a universe that heeds not at all; as the bee is not wrong to make honey in a world that itself can make none. But we are wrong to desire an external justice, since we know that it does not exist. Let that which is in us suffice. All is for ever being weighed and judged in our soul. It is we who shall judge ourselves; or rather, our happiness is our judge. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

The life-converting experience is not the discovery that I have choices to make that determine the way I live out my existence, but the awareness that my that my existence itself is not in the center. Once I 'know' God, that is, once I experience God's love as the love in which all my human experiences are anchored, I can desire only one thing: to be in that love. ~ Henri Nouwen

Words have power, which is why Imam Ali says, "Speak only when your words are more beautiful than the silence." After all, everything in existence sprouted from the vibration of the divinely uttered word "Be! And it is" (36:82). So remember, your tongue is like a knife; it can either kill like the sword of a samurai or save like the scalpel of a surgeon. ~ A. Helwa

Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them. ~ William Hazlitt

One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine

I suggest you take a look at yourself. Not the concepts, not the ideas, not the goods, not the bads. But a timeless purity of existence. A witness to the beauty that is. ~ Prem Rawat

I felt empowered by him, as if his very existence manipulated the balance of my nature from a shy little girl to wonder woman. ~ Kellie Thacker

Their youth is touching, but I know I can't be deceived by it. The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time. You have to go slowly with them. ~ Margaret Atwood

That's what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those ... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.
-Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN ~ Thornton Wilder

But no matter what I do, it will always get me, bother me, and you know what this is, what gets me, and will continue to get me throughout my existence? It's that we as humans will never know the results of the other choice. What would have happened if I chose that instead of this? Naturally, the results or consequences would probably be different, perhaps very different. More importantly, would the other option have been the better choice? We will never know. I will never know. And this will always get me. ~ Jack Serv

To protect the world as we know it, there were three races of hunters created to police and destroy the Daimons. We are called the Pyramid of Protection. Dark-Hunters pursue those who feed on humans, blood, and souls. Dream-Hunters go after the energy- and dreamsuckers, and Were-Hunters stalk the slayers. (Talon)
I guess what I don't understand is why you don't have one group that does it all. (Amanda)
Because we can't. If one person or group was strong enough to walk all four realms of existence, they would be able to enslave the world. Nothing and no one could stop them. And the gods would be greatly pissed. (Kyrian) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I touched follow on my phone's screen. I saw it - a vision - two half sisters who had never known of one another's existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast.

I see you.

I see you, too. ~ Dani Shapiro

Privacy is the very essence of human existence. One wonders why the Indian Supreme Court took so long to reach that conclusion. ~ Kalyan C. Kankanala

Rousseau's ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. 'Everything,' he wrote, 'is at root dependent on politics.' Virtue is the product of good government. 'Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.' The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century. ~ Paul Johnson

Most beings enjoy existence so time comes into being. ~ Frederick Lenz

Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act. ~ Felix J. Palma