Quotes About Existence

Hell is a matter of everyday life, like the Kingdom of God. The choice is yours.

He had some impression that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived.

He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.

Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living.

We are surviving, in this pleasant liberal enclave where people read and speak freely, on borrowed time. But for those not inside - the dispossessed of the world, the poor, the refugees and those forced into exile - existence is wasteland.

Erosova masinerija sastavlja i rastavlja, obnavlja u coveku zudnju za zivotom.

How utterly our past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once.

I have lost my relish for living. I am apathetic and most of the time want nothing, except to understand why there hasn't been more happiness here. Is it like this for everyone? Is this all you get? Is this the most there could be?

He wasn't proud of his past, but he wasn't unproud of it either; it just existed, and there wasn't any point in fetishizing it.

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ...

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art...

non seulement le passé n'est jamais mort, mais il n'est même pas passé

Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.

Well, neither vanity nor the need for adoration - the sad substitute for the supreme confirmation of one's existence which only love, mutual love, can give - belongs among the mortal sins; but they are unsurpassed prompters when we need suggestions for making fools of ourselves.

what we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life

Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action.

Only the existence of a public realm and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.

Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.

Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.

Everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen. By the same token, namely, in its sheer worldly existence, every thing also transcends the sphere of pure instrumentality once it is completed.