Quotes About Existence

Defended over the ages as necessary to human survival, now all of a sudden hunting is necessary to the animals' survival, at least those favored species deigned fit to exist. But think about what he is saying. What a jaded, selfish view of the world and our place within it - a kind of reverse Genesis in which every species shall now be summoned before almighty man to justify their existence or be banished from creation, man the Unmaker of all things.

I don't want to think anymore. Thinking prevents you from living.

to you, unknown corporeal interlocutor who I hope is just kind of out there somehow knowing my thoughts and undertaking your own heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth [...]

A story should have a point, but a life doesn't need one. It just needs to be lived.

Do not breathe simply to exist.

Now I think about how much shutting off was required, just to exist in day-to-day experience. You couldn't express shock at everyone dying right in front of your eyes, because shock felt like a form of cruelty. So you would act like everything might be okay, even when nothing was okay.

10/30/38 Where do you look for someone who's never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair

Oh my God! said one of the Ambers. Is this not the worst trip ever? Did you see the snow? She was a sharp one, this Amber. What would she notice next? The train? The moon? The hilarious vagaries of human existence? Her own head?

It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

And I think something is beautiful if it reveals something important about what it means to be alive.

Stevie had no fears of the dead. The living, however, sometimes gave her the creeps.

If Gertie van Coevorden had two brain cells, each would be amazed to know of the other's existence.

Let it snow and snow and bury me. Very funny, Life.

But there was some life in the thing

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good.

Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man's love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one's best became the tool of one's agony, and man's life on earth became impractical.

I had to originate a philosophical framework of my own, because my basic view of man and existence was theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence.

Art is inextricably tied to man's survival - not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.

Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner—check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

We do not know why we think of them. We do not know why, when we think of them, we feel of a sudden that the earth is good and that it is not a burden to live.

He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality—but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively—so that to her it had never existed.