Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
The modern choice is between non-violence or non-existence.
Sep 19, 2025
We no longer have a choice between violence and non-violence. The choice of today stands between nonviolence or non-existence.
The so-called evils are evils only in relation to a certain thing, and that which is evil in relation to a certain existing thing, either includes the non-existence of that thing or the non-existence of some of its good conditions.
The question is no longer between violence and non-violence it is between non-violence and non-existence.
Nothing proceeds from nothingness, as also nothing passes away into non-existence.
The radio has nothing to do with metal's existence or non-existence. It's for trend only.
It is not unreasonable to assume that the works of God, their existence and preceding non-existence, are the result of His wisdom, but we are unable to understand many of the ways of His Wisdom in His works. On this principle the whole Law of Moses is based; it begins with this principle: "And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. i. 31); and it ends with this principle: "The Rock, perfect is His work" (Deut. xxxii. 4). Note it.
That which is produced with intention has passed over from non-existence to existence.
It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at last, no longer sensible to speak of a universe with only one thing in it.
In Him there is no room for non-existence or imperfection
Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.
The existence of hypocrites does not prove the non-existence of true believers.
Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?
I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.
The [first] argument asserts the non-existence of motion on the ground that that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.
How can non-existence get sick of itself? Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.
I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.
Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.
It does not seem to me to be sufficiently recognized everywhere among the officials that the existence or non-existence of our people and Empire is at stake.
Be ye a refuge to the fearful; bring ye rest and peace to the disturbed; make ye a provision for the destitute; be a treasury of riches for the poor; be a healing medicine for those who suffer pain; be ye doctor and nurse to the ailing; promote ye friendship, and honour, and conciliation, and devotion to God, in this world of non-existence.
The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.
One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one's inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.
It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.
For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.
God ceases to be God only for those who can admit the possibility of His non-existence, and that conception is in itself the most severe punishment they can suffer.
When talking about unicorns, minotaurs, or compassionate conservatives, one does not normally have to prove their non-existence; the mere lack of any evidence is sufficient reason not to believe in any of them.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
And so it is that we do not exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existent things, and order and disorder them, and so it shall be that non-existence shall take us back from existence, and that nameless spirituality shall return to Void, like a tired child home from a very wild circus.
Now rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, that you are so united with God that no one may separate you from Him. I cannot fully praise nor love Him therefore must I die, and cast myself into the divine void, till I rise from non-existence to existence.
Hitherto without being; hidden away in the womb of eternity; possessed neither of thought nor feeling; remote from the range of human ken -- the Man bursts, in some unknown manner, the bars of non-existence, and announces with a cry the beginning of his brief life. In the night of non-existence there bursts forth also a little candle, lit by an unseen hand. Mark well its flame: for it is the life of that Man.
And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.
According to the teaching of our Lord, what is wrong with the world is precisely that it does not believe in God. Yet it is clear that the unbelief which he so bitterly deplored was not an intellectual persuasion of God's non-existence. Those whom he rebuked for their lack of faith were not men who denied God with the top of their minds, but men who, while apparently incapable of doubting him with the top of their minds, lived as though he did not exist.
There is something very peculiar about this form of atheism: It tries to constantly remind us of God while maintaining He does not exist! How can you hate something that is not there? Why would you persistently prove to people the non-existence of a being really not there?
Clay is fashioned into vessels; it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a dwelling, and on the empty space within, its use depends. Thus, while the existence of things may be good, it is the non-existence in them that makes them serviceable.
Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.
In very truth the days are almost free, and if it is another way of saying that our lives are empty, well -- there are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating . . .
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.
Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.
Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.
Our adaptation to the natural forces is a question of existence or non-existence. We cannot transform the universe or nature so that they adapt themselves to us; on the contrary, we must adapt ourselves to nature and her laws.
Ist es an und fu? r sich absurd, das Nichtsein fu? r einUbel zu ? halten; da jedes Ubel wie jedes Gut das Dasein zur Voraussetzung hat, ja sogar das Bewusstsein. It is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness.
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.
We declare that love is the cause of the existence of all phenomena and that the absence of love is the cause of disintegration or non-existence.
A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.