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Existence Quotes
"Not suffering another existence is reaching the Way."
10
"The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself."
10
"To be is the greatest paradox of life facing death."
10
"Our experiments not only proved the existence of a nervous apparatus in the above-mentioned glands, but also disclosed some facts clearly showing the participation of these nerves in normal activity."
10
"Life - whatever else it is - is short maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open."
10
"Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable."
9
"When we are, love is not.When we are not, love is."
9
"When we are not sure we are alive."
8
"It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow."
8
"For I never have seen, and never shall see, that the cessation of the evidence of existence is necessarily evidence of the cessation of existence."
8
"I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you."
8
"The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along."
8
"If this was the true self it was marvelous and what's more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led to an independent existence."
8
"But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why..." she hesitated."Why one makes such a fuss about things," Anthony suggested. "All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self-just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course," he went on, "once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss-that is, if you're sensible. Like me," he added, smiling."
8
"Every day after I wake up, I think, 'Wait... this can't be real; I'm still going to wake up.'"
8
"The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it."
8
"We don't know where we come from and where we go, we fill the missing links with whatever our imaginations can provide us."
7
"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."
7
"Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality."
7
"Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another."
7
"We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea."
7
"We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains."
6
"Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it."
6
"There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic."
6
"I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks."
5
"A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilit. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities."
5
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