Quotes About Existence

Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm--or toward both at once.

Ennui is the martyrdom for those who live and die for no belief

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

I feel I am free but I know I am not.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

So what! He exists. If he had given birth to books, if he had had the misfortune to 'realize' himself, we wouldn't have been talking about him the last hour.

The Future awaits us in order to immolate us: the mind records nothing but the fracture of existence now, and the senses still vibrate only in the expectation of disaster…

I knew nothingness by heart, and I accepted my knowledge.

We have always been dying, and yet death has lost none of its freshness, its originality. Herein lies the secret of secrets.

It's all the way it's always been and probably always will be until there's nothing left any more.

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living.

God is the conditioned creature par excellence, the slave of slaves, prisoner of His attributes, of what He is. Man, on the contrary, has a certain leeway insofar as he is not - insofar as, possessing only a borrowed existence, he struggles in pseudoreality.

There is life only in the inattention to life.

The only part of the planet where existence seemed to have some justification is tainted with gangrene.

A poor wretch who feels time, who is its victim, its martyr, who experiences nothing else, who is time at each moment, knows what a metaphysician or a poet divines only by grace of a collapse or a miracle.

It's already in the past," he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.

We last only as long as our fictions.

reality" falls within the province of lunacy.

How difficult it is to dissolve oneself in Being!

what luck, what a windfall! I am still alive, I am still one of those flesh-and-blood ghosts. . . .

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me

One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.