Quotes About Existence

How is a magician to exist without books? Let someone explain that to me. It is like asking a politician to achieve high office without the benefit of bribes or patronage.

the Theory of Other Worlds. Simply put, it said that when knowledge or power went out of this world it did two things: first, it created another place; and second, it left a hole, a door between this world where it had once existed and the new place it had made.

There was no one there. Which is to say there was someone there. Miss Wintertowne lay upon the bed, but it would have puzzled philosophy to say now whether she were someone or no one at all.

I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life.

Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.

A cadre must know how to carry out instructions, must understand them, adopt them as his own. attach the greatest importance to them, and make them part of his very existence. Otherwise, politics loses its meaning and consists merely of gesticulating. Hence the decisive importance of the cadres department in the apparatus of the Central Committee. Every functionary must be closely studied, from every angle and in the most minute detail.

Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.

Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.

Mon âme a tant d'âges Je me baigne dans une eau où je ne suis pas

Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

If there was no faith there would be no living in this world. We couldn't even eat hash with safety.

And I thought maybe I didn't need to worry about my heart anymore because it had stopped beating a couple of seconds earlier, and I was still sitting there living and breathing-though admittedly I wasn't feeling much of anything.

Not as intolerable as being dead, in my opinion, but I'm very fond of me. I would miss me a lot.

Had it only been a year? It had seemed much longer. Sometimes it had seemed like a lifetime. But maybe all lifetimes weren't measured in hours, days, and years.

Woody Allen had it right: "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon.

It's a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can't stop being it.

The tendency is always strong to believe that whatever receives a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. John Stuart Mill, 1869

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God—no small things—but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them.

Real life makes for good novels because it's lived as a bunch of lies, and because fictions of one kind or another are the only things worth living for.

In the meantime, nothing sufficed, nothing was equal to the question, Why am I here?

out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing.

Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.

How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.

I was born with eyes that can never close...