Quotes About Existence

Nous ne possédons réellement rien; tout nous traverse.

By keeping a record of my experiences I live my life twice over. The past returns to me. The future is always with me. (Wednesday 7 April 1824)

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

It is generally admitted that Dhyana Buddhism, which was born in India and, after undergoing profound changes, reached full development in China, to be finally adopted by Japan, where it is cultivated as a living tradition to this day, has disclosed unsuspected ways of existence which it is of the utmost importance for us to understand.

My voluntary confinement here is restricted less by time than by my earthly existence. In essence I am dead -- dead for my children -- dead for my work ... I am dead but not yet buried, or buried alive -- whichever, the consequences are nearly identical ...

Do you think that life is the most important thing to a person? You don't think it for a moment. You know I don't. I can name a dozen ways of living to which you would prefer death." She

The lightning-bug is brilliant, but he hasn't any mind He stumbles through existence with his head-light on behind. - from The Lightning-Bug

Self is the soul minus God.

There is a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed.

The bawling of babies, always in a way Inappropriate - why should the love and innocent Greet existence with wails? - is proof that not all Is well. Dreams and deliveries never quite mesh.

1 1-2 The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God, in readiness for God from day one.   3-5 Everything was created through him; nothing—not one thing!— came into being without him. What came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by. The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn't put it out.

To be human is to be in trouble.

To be human is nothing less than to be caught in the great congested pilgrimage of existence and to join ourselves freely to it in the face of the evidence of its never-ending troubles.

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!

We are all guests in this world.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness.

Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility.