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Exlpore more Existence quotes

"We live in the shadows of perception. Our dull awareness gives us no useful clues as to why we are here."

"Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure."

"All life depends upon the opportunistic interplay between elemental forces, the mysterious dualities of the numinous universe. Ying and yang forces of the natural world (lightness and darkness, fire and water, expansion and contraction) create tangible dualities that are complementary, interconnected, and independent. Without the firmament in the midst of the waters, without both sunshine and water, no life forms could subsist on this rocky orb. Without the rich soil surrounded by a canopy of an illimitable sky how could we feed ourselves, how could we breathe?"

"It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs."

"This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!"

"We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag


"I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path."


"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."


"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."


"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."


"Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics."


"The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up."
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