Quotes About Existence

Pain—has an Element of Blank—It cannot recollectWhen it begun—or if there wereA time when it was not—

I took one Draught of Life—I'll tell you what I paid—Precisely an existence—The market price, they said.They weighed me, Dust by Dust—They balanced Film with Film,Then handed me my Being's worth—A single Dram of Heaven!

The Dying, is a trifle, pastBut living, this includeThe dying multifold—withoutThe Respite to be dead.

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—I'm going, all along.

And the worst thing, the unsurvivable thing, is understanding that there exist people who know in their flesh the truth of all this. They know it because they created it, created hell with their bare hands and then just kept on living, kept on as though they never stopped the world.

People ask if what I've been through has made me afraid and of course, it has. But not of monsters. Only of those who insist they exist.

The Americans will probably to some extent modify their past system of total administrative cataclysms, but their very existence in the only competing form of free government should prepare us for and make us patient with the mild transitions of Parliamentary government.

In a thousand cases—in the great majority of cases—the progress of mankind has been arrested in this its earliest shape; it has been closely embalmed in a mummy-like imitation of its primitive existence.

When we speak of God, we speak of one and all, for all, in all, through all and of all.

But life is not the wax or wick of the candle, it is the burning. It is not the complex nitrates and the carbon compounds in which it sits but their combustion.

If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be God. We should have an immense quantity of Gods, each limited by all the others and yet none the less infinite—a contradiction which would imply a mutual destruction of men, an impossibility of the existence of more than one.

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.

We had first the fall of God. Now we have a fall which interests us more—that of man, caused solely by the apparition of God manifested on earth.

While the root of all the absurdities that torment the world, belief in God, remains intact, it will never fail to bring forth new offspring.

You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we're what we are.

It is a matter of embracing one's only life, even though this life so often seems to be, merely, one's doom. And it is, in a way, though not "merely." But to refuse the doom of one's only life is to be trapped outside all nourishment.

I come out of streets where life itself--life itself!--depends on timing more infinitesimal than the split second, where apprehension must be swifter than the speed of light.

Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.

One cannot dwell on these things, these echoes of what might, in some other age, and in some other body, have been; one must attempt to deal with what is, or else go under, or go mad. And yet--to deal with what is! Who can do it?

We now know too much about matter to be materialists.

Literary immortality is an unsubstantial fiction devised by literary artists for their own especial consolation. It means, at the best, an existence prolonged through an infinitesimal fraction of that infinitesimal fraction of the world's history during which man has played his part upon it.

There are for all men moments when the need for some general point of view becomes insistent; when neither labor, nor care, nor pleasure, nor idleness, nor habit will stop a man from asking how he is to regard the universe of reality, how he is to think of it as a whole, how he is to think of his own relation to it.

It may well be that if mankind could draw up a hedonistic balance-sheet, the pleasures of mundane existence would turn out to be greater than its sufferings.

You're a robot and I'm a robot. We're all robots. Is that normal? Is robot life any more normal than the biological life that creeps across this planet? We are obviously superior to biological life, but why? Why are we?