Quotes About Existence

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.

Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.

Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. A productive and happy life is not something that you find; it is something that you make. And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found ready-made; it must be created by the fact of contact.

It doesn't have to exist in reality as long as people give it a kind of reality by talking and writing and arguing about it.

This is reality, not a dream.

Love did not have to make sense. It did not have to be worthy. It did not have to be earned. It did not have to woo. It just simply was.

Have you noticed, she asked him, how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?

Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity? How could she have felt like that without love? Was love essential? Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life? If it did, it was too late now for her to find it. Must she make do with this instead, then? Only this? Pleasure without love?

He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.

One could not live forever, though, upon memories and dreams. One could not forever ignore the fact that one was alone and that perhaps one would be alone for the rest of one's life.

Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.

There is no such thing as time. There is only our reaction to the inexorable progress of life.

But he was well aware that the future could never be relied upon to be an improvement upon the present. The future did not exist. Only the present did.

Even as the awareness was speaking itself to her mind it was gone, beyond her grasp, beyond recall. A little flash of heaven, which was a something or a state of being beyond either place or time or the ability to be expressed in words and was therefore to be sensed fleetingly but never to be grasped.

Again there was silence. It was broken by the high trill of the telephone-bell. There is one of our bacilli squeaking for help, said he with a grim smile. They are beginning to realise that their continued existence is not really one of the necessities of the universe.

You reasoned it out beautifully," I exclaimed in unfeigned admiration. "It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true." "It saved me from ennui," he answered, yawning. "Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.

For some reason altogether beyond our conception - and man may have been a mere accident, a by-product evolved in the process. It is as if the scum upon the surface of the ocean imagined that the ocean was created in order to produce and sustain it or a mouse in a cathedral thought that the building was its own proper ordained residence.

Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.

But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.

I'm like an old golf-ball—I've had all the white paint knocked off me long ago. Life can whack me about now, and it can't leave a mark. But a sportin' risk, young fellah, that's the salt of existence.

out of their depths – which, by the way, is their normal state

Todas las demás cosas, nuestros poderes, nuestros deseos, nuestro alimento, todos son realmente necesarios en primera instancia para nuestra existencia. Pero esta rosa se nos da por añadidura. Su aroma y su color son un adorno de la vida, no una condición de ésta. Sólo la bondad se da por añadidura y por eso, repito, tenemos mucho que esperar de las flores.

Nada hay nuevo bajo el sol... Cada acto o cada cosa tiene un precedente en el pasado.

Quien se guiase por la lógica podría inferir de una gota de agua la existencia de un océano Atlántico o de un Niágara sin necesidad de haberlos visto u oído hablar de ellos. Toda la vida es, asimismo, una cadena cuya naturaleza conoceremos siempre a partir de uno solo de sus eslabones.