Quotes About Existence

The children stared at him, awed and a little afraid. For a moment he was a stranger, someone they did not know. Jane had a sudden fantastic feeling that Great-Uncle Merry did not really exist at all, and would vanish away if they breathed or spoke.

People seemed to me to fill life with shadows that should not be there.

There is no eternal blessedness in the world to come because there is no world to come.

I am dying without death; living without life.

how does my worthless life get lived without me?

the end of Rilke's Duino Elegies: Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

It might be impossible to make sense of life: life was not worth living until the attempt to do so had been made." CHARLES E. RAVEN

We got up and smiled at each other. His eyes were lovely, and I was reminded of a line in book I read once, that God exists in the spaces between people.

For almost all these women, their faith is the means by which they make sense of the world and of themselves; it is who they are and what they do, not something they have.

I hope [Willa] still thinks butterflies are beautiful. I think they are. We shouldn't think for a moment that just because their lives are short they shouldn't be here.

Love was both the softest edge and the sharpest edge of what made life real.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.

Choroba jest nocnÄ… stronÄ… ?ycia, naszym bardziej uci??liwym obywatelstwem. Od dnia narodzin ka?dy z nas posiada bowiem jakby dwa paszporty - przynale?y zarówno do Å›wiata zdrowych, jak i do Å›wiata chorych.

What we call nihilism (now) I simply call thought. What thinking doesn't lead to nihilism? (pg. 440)

O objetivo dos retratos das famílias burguesas nos séculos XVIII e XIX era confirmar uma imagem ideal do modelo (proclamando o seu estatuto social e embelezando a sua aparência); em função deste propósito, é fácil compreender porque é que as pessoas não sentiam necessidade de ter mais do que um retrato. O que o registo fotográfico confirma é, mais modestamente, que a pessoa existe; por isso eles nunca são demais.

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show "still." You can just show him being alive.

Has it ever occurred to you that to clutch at life fearfully, unwilling to spend it, is not a form of gratitude to God for life?" Lizzie looked at her as if pained by some bright light. "But to fling one's whole being at a goal of interpreting God's creation—

Things happen as they are meant to happen. There is no grand plan, just flawed human beings bumbling through life.

Not a rule, but a reminder. We must live this day. We'll never get to live it again.

Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything. ?Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?" —E. M. Forster

She even learnt the language of a strange country which Senior Cosetti had been told some people believed still existed, although no-one in the world could say where it was. The name of this country was Wales.