Quotes About Existence

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

Ir a lo fácil o decir la verdad no son solamente dos opciones distintas. Son dos caminos diferentes que atraviesan la vida. Son dos formas totalmente distintas de existir.

Living things die, after all, without attention. Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance.

But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you're not only a body. You're a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being.

You are not only something that is. You are something that is becoming—and the potential extent of that becoming also transcends your understanding.

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

Being is all the more "natural" the longer it has lasted.

a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

Elige tu destino y expresa tu Ser. Como el gran filósofo alemán del siglo XIX Friedrich Nietzsche observó tan brillantemente: «Quien tiene un porqué para vivir encontrará casi siempre el cómo».67

from camouflaging your vice with virtue. What shall I do with the world? Conduct myself as if Being is more valuable than Non-Being. Act so that you are not made bitter and corrupt by the tragedy of existence. That's the essence of Rule 1 (Stand up straight with your shoulders back): confront the uncertainty of the world voluntarily, and with faith and courage.

Mantenerse erguido con los hombros hacia atrás es aceptar con los ojos bien abiertos la terrible responsabilidad que supone vivir.

it is the things that occur every single day that truly make up our lives, and time spent the same way over and again adds up at an alarming rate.

If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you're lost. Nothing will save you

We are low-resolution ("kenotic") versions of God. We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we're not exactly nothing, either.

Quien tiene un porqué para vivir encontrará casi siempre el cómo».

In other words, you decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness—if only you behaved properly. And it is that decision, that declaration of existential faith, that allows you to overcome nihilism, and resentment, and arrogance.

We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.

It's not God I don't accept. Understand this," says Ivan. "I do not accept the world that He created, this world of God's, and cannot agree with it.

Only unusually strong and logically consistent people act in this manner. Having realized all the stupidity of the joke that is being played on us and seeing that the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living and that it is better not to exist, they act and put an end to this stupid joke; and they use any means of doing it: a rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, a train.

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five? —William Blake, from "A Memorable Fancy," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It's one of the two major fears of people. 'Cause one is social humiliation. And the other is something like mortality and death.

We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being.

Reason is something alive. It lives in all of us. It's older than any of us. It's best understood as a personality, not a faculty.

Somos animales de carga y tenemos que aguantar lo que nos ponen encima para justificar nuestra miserable existencia.