Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
A. N. Wilson
While I am a single-issue voter, I certainly don't live a single-issue existence. Many causes affect my family and me, and I intend to be a voice for those as well.
Abby Johnson
Prime Minister Sharon, Prime Minister Abbas, I urge you today to end the designs of those who seek destruction, annihilation and occupation, and I urge you to have the will and the courage to begin to realize our dreams of peace, prosperity and coexistence.
Abdullah II of Jordan
My existence is about making movies, so I've just got to rock and roll with the punches. You want to make movies on telephones, I'm there.
Abel Ferrara
The seminaries must be like the churches' poor relations, prolonging their existence with austerity.
Abraham Kuyper
It's the same thing that drives people to want to experience sexual pleasure or have one too many drinks. We all want to experience the other, and to get out of our daily existence.
Adam Arkin
To suppose more than one supreme Source of infinite wisdom, power, and all perfections, is to assert that there is no supreme Being in existence.
Adam Clarke
Now it would be as absurd to deny the existence of God, because we cannot see him, as it would be to deny the existence of the air or wind, because we cannot see it.
People wanted Bitcoin to live so much, they basically willed it back into existence. That showed me how passionate this community was about it.
Adam Draper
The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.
Adam Johnson
After the French Revolution, it was not the treason of the king that was in question; it was the existence of the king. You have to be very careful when you judge and execute somebody for being a symbol.
Adam Michnik
I think that every band tries to mature their sound through their existence, you know?
Adam Rich
The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day.
Adam Savage
I made a written report which is still today in existence. I have a photocopy of it, and I am saying that in production this aircraft could perhaps substitute for three propeller- driven aircraft of the best existing type. This was my impression.
Adolf Galland
I would like to mention that I have flown the 262 first in May '43. At this time, the aircraft was completely secret. I first knew of the existence of this aircraft only early in '42 - even in my position. This aircraft didn't have any priority in design or production.
There are two evil futurities and one good. A miserable future existence is evil; and annihilation, or nigban, is an evil - a fearful evil. A happy future existence is alone good.
Adoniram Judson
With music, when you finish a record, you are entwined with it throughout your existence in a way which is both interesting and challenging because it's a living form, you have to come back to it.
Adrianne Lenker
We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
Adrienne Rich
I would love for my existence as an artist to be completely about my art - not about my social media, or what I do vs what's cool right now, or even whether or not I sound okay in an interview.
Aesop Rock
Pluralism is no longer simply an asset or a prerequisite for progress and development; it is vital to our existence.
However dark, however demanding the realities of existence are, artists provide the lift, the light, the ways to make it through. They help us find the joys and delights, the hopes we need for our days and hours. I am grateful for their gifts.
The co-existence of religious values in the lives of individuals and secular rules in the governance of the state should be clearly defined.
Now it is time to make historic reassessments in order to transform our region into one of stability, freedom, prosperity, cultural revival and co-existence. In this new regional order there should be less violence and fewer barriers between countries, societies and sects.
It is very important that the world know that there have been 500 years of peaceful coexistence in Turkey between the Jews and Moslems.
I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.
Any child who has lost a parent probably knows every single photograph in existence of that parent.
Sometimes, we get mixed up when we say that profit is not important for stakeholders. Oxygen is not the reason a person lives. But it is essential to have oxygen, although it's not the only reason for a person's existence. It is similar for profit.
Married life is an existence with bars around it.
As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.
Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.
It's a lot harder to find fault with the mundane details of daily existence when you really, really know on a cellular level that you're going to go, and that this moment, right now, is life. Life isn't what happens to you in 20 years. This moment, right now, is your life.
I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.
For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
Human-caused climate change threatens almost every aspect of human existence.
I used to be very routine-based and the new thing in my life is not having a clear, full-time existence.
The royal family's existence is a constant reminder of the hollowness of John Major's rhetoric, and idiotic statements by its leading members a constant boost to the republican cause. They're fine opening hospitals. It's when they open their mouths they get into trouble.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
I'm definitely not above wanting to be liked. Because, I mean, that feels less... lonely? But to be honest, because it was never my dream, I live quite a pressure-less existence, y'know. And of course, that's not true, but it's partly true.
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
Elephants are not human, of course. They are something much more ancient and primordial, living on a different plane of existence. Long before we arrived on the scene, they worked out a way of being in the world that has not fundamentally changed and is sustainable, and not predatory or destructive.
I grew up very comfortable in this bizarre, circus-like existence, but, as comfortable as I was, I was also aware of the struggles that actors go through.
In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.
Sometimes I want to withhold judgement on whether something is good or bad, but I do feel like identifying with TV characters - connecting to them emotionally more than you connect to literal, physical people in your life - causes problems. They just don't have the same existence or boundaries as you do. They resemble us, but they are not us.
People tend to see modernism as the opposite of a celebration. They see it as a fracturing and an art built round an absence, but it's really a celebration of our existence.
We don't really know where human sexual orientations come from yet. What we do know is that the evidence we have that sexual orientation includes an innate component doesn't seem to point to the existence of simple 'gay genes' and 'straight genes.'
Around 4000BC, the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherer way of life here gave way to a more settled, farming existence. Those Neolithic people built wooden trackways across the salt marshes and reed beds.
I gave up meat when I was 18, and it was an ethical decision. I loved the taste, and went on holiday to Greece, fairly gorging myself on lamb souvlaki before taking the plunge into a meatless existence.