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Existence Quotes
"There's always been some moron-who usually went by the name of 'producer' - who would have to justify his existence, and interfere."
23
"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."
23
"I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks."
22
"Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him."
22
"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."
22
"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."
21
"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us."
19
"It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs."
19
"Find a calm lake and wait for the twilight in silence! There, existence will visit you with all its magnificence! The existence of the Existence can best be felt in the presence of dimness and in the absence of crowds and noises!"
19
"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?"
18
"Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are."
18
"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."
18
"How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long time, listening to the warm crackle of the flames."
18
"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating."
17
"We don't know where we come from and where we go, we fill the missing links with whatever our imaginations can provide us."
17
"One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard."
17
"And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape."
17
"Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it."
17
"You've remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what's more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven't been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else's life-war."
17
"So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo."
16
"The answer to our existence lies in existence itself."
16
"We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?"
16
"Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, 'I am.' We are ontological oxymorons."
16
"What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed."
16
"But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual, the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross."
16
"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."
16
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