Quotes About Existence

Man is not content to be man. But he doesn't know what to revert to, nor how to recover a state of which he has no clear memory. His nostalgia for it is the basis of his being, and it is by such nostalgia he communicates with all that remains of what is oldest in himself.

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.

I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more.

We cannot elude existence by explanations, we can only endure it, love it or hate it, adore it or dread it, in that alternation of happiness and horror which expresses the very rhythm of being, its oscillations, its dissonances, its bright or bitter vehemences.

No need to elaborate works

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

The great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the 'will to live,' in 'idea,' or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtle displacements of meanings. What is loathes the verbal embrace, and our innermost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moment. Moreover, Being itself is only a pretension of Nothingness.

Bütün hakikatler bize kar??d?r. Ama yaÅŸamaya devam ederiz çünkü onlar? olduklar? gibi kabulleniriz, çünkü onlardan sonuç ç?karmay? reddederiz.

Man gives off a special odor: of all the animals, he alone smells of the corpse.

There exists an undeniable pleasure in knowing that everything you do has no real basis, that whether or not you commit an action is a matter of indifference. The fact nonetheless remains that in our daily gestures we compromise with Vacuity - that is, we turn and turn about, and occasionally, at the same time, we take the world as real and unreal. We mingle pure truth and sordid truths and this amalgam, the thinker's disgrace, is the living man's revenge.

De ceux qui ne diffusent pas autour d'eux un relent d'échec, on peut difficilement dire qu'ils ont vécu. La décomposition est la seule trace que laisse la marche de la vie, cet étrange pourrissement de la matière. Création et destruction sont les différentes directions d'une même substance qui s'affirme en s'effilochant.

Birth and chain are synonyms. To see the light of day, to see shackles . . .

I have never known a single sensation of fulfillment, of true happiness, without thinking that it was the moment when — now or never — I should disappear for good.

Quand on sait de façon absolue que tout est irréel, on ne voit vraiment pas pourquoi on se fatiguerait à le prouver.

Where to go? Where to live? And what to seek in the uproar of a Babylonized planet?

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.

At this precise moment, no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have as good a conscience as if I had never existed.

Parmenides. Nowhere do I perceive the Being he exalts, and fail to see myself in his sphere, which includes no fault, no place for me.

After the Spanish publication of the 'Précis,' two Andalusian students asked me if it was possible to live without 'fundamentación.' I answered that it was true that I had found no solid basis anywhere and that I had nonetheless managed to endure, for with the years one got used to everything, even vertigo. Then, too, one does not constantly keep watch and interrogate oneself, absolute lucidity being incompatible with breathing.

Vivere: specializzarsi nell'errore

todos los males de la vida vienen de una «concepción de la vida».

When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Il semplice fatto di esistere è talmente grave che, a paragone, Dio non è che un mero trastullo.

Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me — and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past!