Quotes About Existence

C'est par le verbe et l'acte que nous nous insérons dans le monde humain, et cette insertion est comme une seconde naissance dans laquelle nous confirmons et assurons le fait brut de notre apparition physique originelle .

A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. Whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition.

from the human viewpoint 'sub specie aeternitatis' always means also 'sub specie mortis

This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.

The happiness achieved in isolation from the world and enjoyed within the confines of one's own private existence can never be anything but the famous "absence of pain," a definition on which all variations of consistent sensualism must agree.

Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein.

the concept of happiness is present in us through a consciousness that is equated with memory (that is, since happiness is not an "innate" but a remembered idea), this "outside the human condition" actually means before human existence.

The modern discovery of history and historical consciousness owed one of its greatest impulses neither to a new enthusiasm for the greatness of man, his doings and sufferings, nor to the belief that the meaning of human existence can be found in the story of mankind, but to the despair of human reason, which seemed adequate only when confronted with man-made objects.

Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past causes which we may assign to it, this past itself comes into being only with the event itself.

Through remembrance man discovers this twofold "before" of human existence . . . . This is the reason why the return to one's origin (redire ad creatorem) can at the same time be understood as an anticipating reference to one's end.

It is memory and not expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger's approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.

I can only seek that thing of whose existence I have some kind of knowledge.

The gap between past and future: the nunc stans...timeless region, an eternal presence in complete quiet, lying beyond human clocks and calendars altogether, the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man ... this small non-time space is the very heart of time. ...it is the very home, the only home, of Mind, Soul and Art; the only point where past and future are gathered together and the pattern and the meaning of the whole become clear.

2) Bolshevism is understood in religious terms. "What believers of traditional religions ascribe to God Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Bolsheviks ascribe to the allegedly scientific laws of social development." (This quid pro quo of God and historical law has by now apparently convinced everybody who believes that neither the existence of God nor that of historical laws can be demonstrated scientifically.)

With the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free, Penguin Books, 2020.

Death removes us from both the humanly constituted world and the divine fabric. Since man is transitory, he loses both the world into which he is created as well as the world he created for himself by his love of the world.

Death shows man that he is nothing if man does not understand himself as a part of the whole. By showing man his nothingness, however, death also points out both his source and a possible escape from nothingness—from death.

The question about man's own being, in which the specific being in life assumes such decisive importance even if it is seen as a nullity, becomes a moot question. The concrete course of life is no longer important. If death only brings us a new being (which in fact is our original being), existence has been leveled out, and it does not matter whether human life is long or short.

the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements' avowed cynical "realism" and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality. Or, the irritating incompatibility between the actual power-of modern man (greater than ever before, great to the point where he might challenge the very existence of his own universe) and the impotence of modern men to live in, and understand the sense of, a world which their own strength has established.

Can life be said to exist at all?