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Existence Quotes
"For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?"
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"We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory."
16
"On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment."
15
"We are born more dead than when we die after we have searched death through the storm of the instants of our entire life."
15
"I am a tale, I am a book, written in different languages and styles I can't be read, can't be understood,neither by me nor the greatest of minds I am too big, I am too small, to be processed or seen by the naked eyeI am too dim, I am too bright, to appear in the shadows or the sunshine."
15
"A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer better fantasies... And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else."
15
"It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone..."
15
"To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence."
15
"I am alive because you want me to."
15
"Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even it if goes wrong, it lives."
14
"God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest."
14
"You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all."
14
"This StoneHe went looking for a roadthat doesn't lead to death.He went looking for that roadand found it.It was a stone road.He walked that roadthat doesn't lead to death.He walked on it awhilebefore he stopped,having turned to stone.Now he stands there on that roadthat doesn't lead to deathnot going anywhere.He can't dance.from his eyes stones fall.The rainbow people pass himcrossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,going from the Four Housesto the dancing in the Five Houses.They pick up his tears.This stone is a tearfrom his eye, this stonegiven me on the mountainby one who died before my birth,this stone, this stone."
14
"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."
14
"We live as ripples of energy in the vast ocean of energy."
14
"We live in the shadows of perception. Our dull awareness gives us no useful clues as to why we are here."
14
"Before you were born, and were still too tiny for the human eye to see, you won the race for life from among 250 million competitors. And yet, how fast you have forgotten your strength, when your very existence is proof of your greatness."
14
"Explore the infinite possibilities in existence."
13
"What destiny is there, but to sense, observe, merge, re-emerge,Empty, yet filled, spreading everywhere, inside, outside, in, Pulsing, fluctuating, breathing as part of one being, Whispering, feeling, reflecting, flowing between hot and cold, Mineral and plant, dark and light, love and fear, new and old."
13
"The world's existence is with common intent. No one has ownership of it. One may do whatever suits him. You cannot criticize him; you cannot say, 'This is wrong'. You cannot even think it. Everything is under nature's management."
13
"I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavors. Where might I be, if I were not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not me, if this outward appearance that is me did not encase me, separating my consciousness from that of others who are not me? An organism-a blind, rash, pitiful eruption of the insistent assertion of the will. Far better, really, if that will were to drift free in a night without time or space, than to languish in a prison cell lit only by the flickering, uncertain flame of the intellect."
13
"Anywhere we go, we will have our self with us; we cannot escape ourselves."
13
"Life rises out of death, death rises out of life, in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars."
13
"Ain't you thinkin' what's it gonna be like when we get there? Ain't you scared it won't be nice like we thought?No, she said quickly. No, I ain't. You can't do that. I can't do that. It's too much - livin' too many lives. Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes, it'll on'y be one."
13
"A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition, you cannot hear him but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show and you wonder why he is alive."
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