Quotes about existence

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Elements of the Philosophy of Right

What is reasonable is real that which is real is reasonable.

Pushpa Rana - Just the Way I Feel

There was existence in oblivion there is you in oblivion.

Walker Percy -

But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building f

Abhijit Kar Gupta -

Much of our existence is to deal with steep problems and slippery solutions the rest is the celebration of life!

C. JoyBell C. -

And so the beauty was in being alone but it was also the pain.

Marcellin Berthelot -

I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.

M.F. Moonzajer - A moment with God ; Poetry

I am not sure the God exists but I have no doubt of the Goddess existence.

S.T. Joshi - God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation it cannot be assumed at the start.

Sean Carroll - From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern.

Criss Jami -

The denial of truth does not harm the Truth it only harms that which denies the Truth.

Hermann Hesse - Gertrude

Youth ends when egotism does maturity begins when one lives for others.

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

I don't complain about the horror of life I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering.

Irvin D. Yalom - The Schopenhauer Cure

The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.

Dejan Stojanovic - The Sun Watches the Sun

Unborn eternity does not die existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.

Kahlil Gibran -

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans in one aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence.

Susan Sontag -

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Louis Althusser -

Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.

Stephen Harper -

Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.

Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr. -

There are problems and conditions of this world that man nor woman can solve it requires His grace and mercy.

Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr. -

As men and women we need to occupy our space as Kings and Queens move into our new reality. It only requires mindset.

Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr. -

Only a few will LEAD the rest will follow. Who is leading you and what are they leading you to?

Aleister Crowley - The Book of the Law

Remember all ye that existence is pure joy that all the sorrows are but as shadows they pass & are done but there is that which remains.

Ewan McGregor -

I like the idea of being a sculptor. Just me alone, making something - that solitary existence.

Tom Hodgkinson -

Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.

Edmund Burke -

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Hans Adolf Krebs -

The existence of common features in different forms of life indicates some relationship between the different organisms, and according to the concept of evolution, these relations stem from the circumstance that the higher organisms, in the course of millions of years, have gradually evolved from simpler ones.

Shirley MacLaine -

I don't need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.

Pat R - Os Homens Nunca Saberão Nada Disto

She falls back like a dead weight. The red hair loosens from the hair band and spreads in the colorful surface of the pillows, her white body is in sharp contrast, the gleam in her bloodshot eyes becomes intense and shines. My aunt, lying like this, looks like a goddess in an orgasm, only that, inside, she is suffering. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. The same is happening to us, we're really disappearing. I think of the matter of our bodies, changeable, disappearing in the particles of the

William L. Rowe - God and the Problem of Evil

1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.3) (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

Stephen Law -

Reasonableness is a matter of degree. Beliefs can be very reasonable (Japan exists), fairly reasonable (quarks exist), not unreasonable (there's intelligent life on other planets) or downright unreasonable (fairies exist).There's a scale of reasonableness, if you like, with very reasonable beliefs near the top and deeply unreasonable ones towards the bottom. Notice a belief can be very high up the scale, yet still be open to some doubt. And even when a belief is low down, we can still acknowledg

Atul Gawande - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult lif

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Night Flight

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

Steven L. Peck - A Short Stay in Hell

Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that something we could cling to? I could be with this other. I could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was enough, both sufficient and necessary. In Hell there was no sense of place, because all places were the same. Uniform monotony. A place without place. A place without context. But, here, now, I could rub her hand and sh

Paul Bowles - The Spider's House

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying.

Craig D. Lounsbrough -

Timeless principles never age, and truth is as young as the day it was spoken into existence.

Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain

Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.

Ricardo Piglia - Blanco nocturno

Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of

Walker Percy - Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help BookorHow you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist ChristiansorWhy is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangestorWhy is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Tauru

Sōseki Natsume - And Then

There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he stared absently at his legs. They began to look strange. They no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all, but rather, completely unconnected, they sprawled rudely before him. When he got this far, he realized something he had never noticed before—that his legs were unbearably hideous. With hair growing unevenly and blue streaks running rampant, they were terribly strange creatures.

Annie Ali -

The world has its own ways of treating us like what we will never be, but want to be. It relinquishes its grip on our souls while lulling us with the songs of freedom and conquest of beauty. It magnifies every tiny bit of something useless over an unfathomable presence of humanity. And we all waste the whole of our lives standing in queue for gaining its attention to be abdicated as if we never existed in the eyes of our fellow men.

James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full.

Ryū Murakami - Almost Transparent Blue

When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened

A.J. Darkholme - Rise of the Morningstar

Sometimes we exist long enough to lead the next generation; other times, only to plant a seed and let its resonations of our time here on Earth ripple into new waves.

Marty Rubin -

Free will, determinism, meaning, existence, etc. are academic problems, not problems in life.

A.J. Darkholme - Rise of the Morningstar

We are but cells living in a much larger organism, however, this does not make our existence less significant – for an organism without cells is no organism at all. We define it; we make it what it is. We are responsible for its health, its functionality, and above all, its purpose. A lone cell can restore the others, or a lone cell can spread a plague.

Álvaro de Campos -

I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.

Isidor Isaac Rabi -

To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.

Alberto Caeiro - The Keeper of Sheep

Yes, this is what my senses alone have learned:—Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer - The Mute's Soliloquy: a Memoir

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

Jeffrey Tayler -

A purpose derived from a false premise – that a deity has ordained submission to his will – cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals — solving our world’s problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion and tradition – provides ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason.

SHOOWA - ジンと猫は呼ぶと来ない [Jin to Neko wa Yobu to Konai]

People don't exist without the past, I know. But the past isn't alive. It's you who's alive.

Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary

At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

Andrei Tarkovsky -

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

José Luis Ruiz -

You only exist because of the agreements you made with yourself and with the other humans around you.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

Charlotte Eriksson - Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem.Watch me burn.Love always, Charlotte

Nikki Rowe -

there is a silent beauty hidden amongst pain, if you sit in it you may never find it; if you grow through it, You'll find the treasure.

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

The whole duty of our existence is fear God.

Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

We see, surrounding the narrow raft illuminated by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated on the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of

Nathaniel Hawthorne -

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.

Giorge Leedy - Uninhibited From Lust To Love

BE REALBring it on-And let truth be my existence.Value my life-And tell me like it is.Bark at me when I'm wrong-And hug me when I'm right.Praise me if I succeed-And tell me if I fail.Laugh at me if you think I'm funny-And wink at me if you think I'm cute.Yell at me if I ever hurt you-And scold me if I'm ever bad.Keep things real with me, Because I want to be alive,I want my world to be real-And I want to see your spirit.I want to hear you breathe- And I want to know how you feel.Don’t waste my t

Vera Nazarian - Cobweb Forest

There is only Love -- and Stories. All else is but a shadow dream.

The Beatles - Vocal Score

He's a real nowhere man,Sitting in his Nowhere Land,Making all his nowhere plansfor nobody.Doesn't have a point of view,Knows not where he's going to,Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

Vladimir Nabokov -

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

1 Minuto na Palma da Mão -

Life is made of MOMENTS. From the beginning to the end of EXISTENCE. But not everything that happens to BE necessarily one day will lose its title. Time has the PRIVILEGE to create and destroy, but above all, to ETERNIZE. Time has the power to promote meetings, disagreements, but mainly TEACHING. Influence in the most desperate situations as in the most beautiful MEMORY. Time is loss, but it is CURE. It is the second of birth and the whole LIFE. Time is lord! But like every sovereign, it is only

Gustaf Stromberg -

Memory is that element in our consciousness that connects the past with the present. If we had no memory, there would be only one moment of our life, the moment we call now, and we would never consciously recognize more than this single moment.

Erwin Schrödinger -

What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as yo

Johnny Rich - The Human Script

Time passes. I drift in and out. As if I cease to be, until I remember to exist again.

Ashim Shanker - Only the Deplorable

Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was—to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends—albeit more by circumstance than by choice—he understood the importance of this process and revered

Thomas Carlyle - Sartor Resartus

Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.

Arthur Schopenhauer -

It is for this reason that we find that co-existence, which could neither be intime alone, for time has no contiguity, nor in space alone, forspace has no before, after, or now,

Moonshine Noire -

Is it all just a psychotic dream? What is life?

Maya Angelou -

I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love – for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.

Susan Waterfield -

Really good writing has purpose and that purpose should be to shape other minds to desire truth and a more noble purpose in life and to become more thoughtful and knowledgable about important things like being kind and loving towards all living beings on our planet and not just humans but all animals.

Terry Goodkind - Blood of the Fold

Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person.We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence.

Patrick White - The Tree Of Man

And the cavern of fire was enormous, labyrinthine, that received the man. He branched and flamed, glowed and increased, and was suddenly extinguished in the little puffs of smoke and tired thoughts.

Alberto Caeiro - The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.Nobody goes faster than the legs they have.If where I want to go is far away, I’m not there in an instant.

Jacques Lacan -

...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

Thomas Bernhard - Extinction

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which w

Suman Pokhrel -

Desires stay unaware of man’s fragile existence authored by scarcity

Andrei Tarkovsky -

Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards.' In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to 'fly upwards

Richelle E. Goodrich - Secrets of a Noble Key Keeper

Some live for their own joy and pleasure. Some live to ease the burdens of others.  Then there are those who seem to exist for pain's sake only, that in the end the wrathful fire sent to consume their oppressors will be justified."~ In loving memory of Miss Annabelle Fancher

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -

Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level - but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it - I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here

H.P. Lovecraft - Autobiography and Miscellany

It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.

Luis Buñuel - My Last Sigh

What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn't pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it's as if he didn't. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery. Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly e

Karen Armstrong -

When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence. They have felt that it is deeply connected with themselves and with the natural world, but that it also goes beyond. However we choose to define it - it has been called God, Brahman, or Nirvana - this transcendence has been a fact of human life. We have all experienced something similar, whatever our theological opinions, when we listen to a great piece of music or h

Karen Armstrong - Three Faiths

When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence.

Alamvusha -

Maybe life isn't for everyone,Sometimes you do things to start anew life.But the new paths will always bring you back to the old ones or just show a glimpse of it so that you again go through those thousand memories.and no matter how much you try to get rid of the old shoe, Life will bring you to a certain point where you would want to throw off the new shoe and wear the old one back again..and Maybe, maybe you would or maybe you would not.For who knows, We re mysterious beings in these mysterio

Erwin Schrödinger - My View of the World

It was said by Epicurus, and he was probably right, that all philosophy takes its origin from philosophical wonder. The man who has never at any time felt consciously struck by the extreme strangeness and oddity of the situation in which we are involved, we know not how, is a man with no affinity for philosophy - and has, by the way, little cause to worry. The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the

Israelmore Ayivor - Dream Big!: See Your Bigger Picture!

Never despise the talents you have. It is by them that you will do something that has not yet come into existence until you were born.

Stephen Chbosky - The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.

Katlyn Charlesworth - Where Men Sit

As with most dreams of men, the ideal becomes just that––an ideal––and the pure rationale of existence is thrust upon the best of the dreamers.

Jackie Haze - Borderless

Venice was a contrast from Los Angeles itself, where you might see a woman with $15,000 tits, a face frozen in place by Botox, wobbling with her $4,000 Gucci bag right past a child with a sunken belly and exposed ribs encaging a heart too weak to scream.

Criss Jami - Healology

To me, many of what seemed to be Bible contradictions only pointed to the grace of Christ. It is not so much a rule book on how to be holy as it is a prophecy of the One who can make you holy. In this, I see God as the least bigoted of all in existence: While men always, in their hearts, delight in vengeance for being wronged, God is the only Being who wants to free you from the penalty of His own laws.

J.R. Rim -

Death does not end my life, it opens the door to a life without end.