Being Quotes

Letting go is not getting rid of. Letting go is letting be.

~ Sally Brampton

This helping-people business was an attractive idea, I'll admit, because up to now I'd not done much more than be, and when I wasn't just being, I'd caused some pain, too.

~ Brock Clarke

Your number one mission in life is to be who you were intended to be.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I hate being in my shoes...I am a deadman there!

~ Deyth Banger

What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?

~ Peter Watts

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It’s inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera.

~ Benson Bruno

I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.

~ Therese Doucet

I Think, Therefore I Am ... I Think ...

~ David Ski

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

~ Russell Banks

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

~ Albert Camus

The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different. Each part of what constitutes the unity of the human species corresponds to a proper being and a proper Being, to an identity of one's own. In order to carry out the destiny of humanity, the man-human and the woman-human each have to fulfill what they are and at the same time realize the unity that they constitute.

~ Luce Irigaray

Quit aspiring and dreaming and start being.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I think, therefore I am... confused.

~ Benjamin Hoff

What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Be healthy by being outdoors in the natural daylight with nature!

~ Steven Magee

Being crazy lets me do some pretty insane things.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

As a radiation researcher, I am at one with being perceived as crazy!

~ Steven Magee

I'm tired of being what everyone else wants.Tomorrow, I'm going to be what I want for a change.I'm going to be a rainbow.Now that's different!

~ Anthony T. Hincks

Ours was such a delicious risk.My being abruptly and altogetherEcstatic and be-stilled.

~ Scott Hastie

I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.

~ Anthony Kiedis

Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person?

~ Emma Newman

I just think it's bad when a boy looks at a girl and thinks that the way he sees her is better than she actually is. And I think it's bad when the most honest way a boy can look at a girl is through a camera.

~ Stephen Chbosky

Isi, I’m trying to say that you’ve been… no, you’re so, you’re–” He stopped.You are,” he said. His hand found hers, and he held her finger tightly, as though he did not dare to do any more than hold her one hand, and look at her, and breathe deeply.

~ Shannon Hale

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

~ May Sarton

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.

~ Martin Heidegger

Being is seeing in the human dimension.

~ Stephen R. Covey

Only when you explore the ecstasy of simply being, where even to breathe is a distraction, can you call yourself complete.

~ Sadghuru

Whatever you do don't let anybody talk you into doing something about the way you look ever.

~ John Casablancas

The *second task* consists in distinguishing the mode of knowing operative in ontology as science of Being, and this requires us to *work out the methodological structure of ontological-transcendental differentiation*. In early antiquity it was already seen that Being and its attributes in a certain way underlie beings and precede them and so are *a proteron*, an earlier. The term denoting this character by which Being precedes beings is the expression *a priori*, *apriority*, being earlier or prior. As *a priori*, Being is earlier than beings. The meaning of this *a priori*, the sense of the earlier and its possibility, has never been cleared up. The question has not even once been raised as to why the determinations of Being and Being itself must have this character of priority and how such priority is possible. To be earlier is a determination of time, but it does not pertain to the temporal order of the time that we measure by the clock; rather, it is an earlier that belongs to the inverted world. Therefore, this earlier which characterises Being is taken by the popular understanding to be the later. Only the interpretation of Being by way of temporality can make clear why and how this feature of being earlier, apriority, goes together with Being. The *a priori* character of Being and of all the structures of Being accordingly calls for a specific kind of approach and way of apprehending Being―*a priori cognition*.The basic components of *a priori* cognition constitute what we call *phenomenology*. Phenomenology is the name for the method of ontology, that is, of scientific philosophy. Rightly conceived, phenomenology is the concept of a method. It is therefore precluded from the start that phenomenology should pronounce any theses about Being which have specific content, thus adopting a so-called standpoint. ―Martin Heidegger, from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

~ Martin Heidegger

Because they are assertions about Being in the light of time properly understood, all ontological propositions are Temporal propositions. It is only because ontological propositions are Temporal propositions that they can and must be *a priori propositions*. It is only because ontology is a Temporal science that something like the *a priori* appears in it. *A priori* means from the earlier or the earlier. *Earlier* is patently a *time-determination*. If we have been observant, it must have occurred to us that in our explications we employed no word more frequently than the expression already. It already antecedently lies at the ground: it must always already be understood beforehand: where beings are encountered, Being has already beforehand been projected. In using all of these temporal, really Temporal, terms we have in mind something that the tradition since Plato calls the *a priori*, even if it may not use the very term itself. In the preface to his *Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft [Metaphysical principles of natural science], Kant says: Now to cognize something *a priori* means to cognize it from its mere possibility. Consequently, *a priori* means that which makes beings as beings possible in *what* and *how* they are. But why is this possibility labeled by the term earlier? Obviously not because we recognize it earlier than beings. For what we experience first and foremost is beings, that which is; we recognize Being only later or maybe even not at all. This time-determination earlier cannot refer to the temporal order given by the common concept of time in the sense of intratemporality. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that a time determination is present in the concept of the *a priori*, the earlier. But, because it is not seen how the interpretation of Being necessarily occurs in the horizon of time, the effort has to be made to explain away the time determination by means of the *a priori*. Some go so far as to say that the *a priori*―the essentialities, the determination of beings in their Being―is extratemporal, supratemporal, timeless. That which does the enabling, the possibilities are characterized by a time-determination, the earlier, because in this *a priori* nothing of time is supposed to be present, hence *locus a non lucendo*? Believe it if you wish.―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

~ Martin Heidegger

As a method however, the *method of ontology* is nothing but the sequence of the steps involved in the approach to Being as such and the elaboration of its structures. We call this method of ontology *phenomenology*. In more precise language, phenomenological investigation is explicit effort applied to the method of ontology. However, such endeavors, their success or failure, depend primarily, in accordance with our discussion, on how far phenomenology has assured for itself the object of philosophy―how far, in accordance with its own principle, it is unbiased enough in the face of what the things themselves demand. We cannot now enter any further into the essential and fundamental constituent parts of this method. In fact, we have applied it constantly. What we would have to do would be merely to go over the course already pursued, but now with explicit reflection on it. But what is most essential is first of all to have traversed the whole path once, so as, for one thing, to learn to wonder scientifically about the mystery of things and, for another, to banish all illusions, which settle down and nest with particular stubbornness precisely in philosophy.There is no such thing as *the one* phenomenology, and if there could be such a thing it would never become anything like a philosophical technique. For implicit in the essential nature of all genuine method as a path toward the disclosure of objects is the tendency to order itself always toward that which it itself discloses. When a method is genuine and provides access to the objects, it is precisely then that the progress made by following it and the growing originality of the disclosure will cause the very method that was used to become necessarily obsolete. The only thing that is truly new in science and in philosophy is the genuine questioning and struggle with things which is at the service of this questioning. ―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

~ Martin Heidegger

If you blend in, you don't stand out.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

How can I be myself, when others expect me to be someone else?

~ Anthony T. Hincks

The whole idea of being here is to ask everything...

~ Deyth Banger

Having been is the surest kind of being.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

The runner is coming to know, or will know if he runs enough...that the universe is the smallest divisible unit.

~ George Sheehan

I enjoy being a lemming,we line up to do everything together.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all.

~ Charles Bukowski

All too often it's easier to be someone else than just being yourself.

~ Anthony T. Hincks