Quotes About Existence

Le plus clair de mon temps je le passe à l'obscurcir.

Qu'est-ce que vous faites dans la vie, vous? – J'apprends des choses, dit Colin. Et j'aime Chloé.

We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

Was wäre, wenn wir die Annahme explizit machten und konkretisieren müssten, dass alle ernst zu nehmende Kunst und Literatur, und nicht nur die Musik, auf die Nietzsche diesen Begriff anwendet, ein opus metaphysicum ist?

Our lives are brief, they are like strings of illusions that die, like little bubbles in our entrails. We don't even know what game it's playing at with us, but we have nothing else. It's the only thing that's more or less certain on this earth.

In every moment of conscious happiness there mingles an undertone of sadness. However full of enjoyment the present, the future is always uncertain, and it is the feeling of this--the feeling that we are of the class of ephemera--perpetually recurring in the rarest and sweetest moments of existence, that constitutes, more than any other, the "one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin."

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

I don't know. You're made of metal, but you have feelings, and you think about things, and that means you have a soul. And souls don't die.

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost.

You need to understand something Cal-in this world, we're not humans having a divine experience. We're divine beings having a human experience.

Perhaps we don't need these religious concoctions to pillow the fear of death. Just the fact that there is an unknown, and something greater, can bring a feeling of peace. That's enough for me.

difference in kind between empirical questions characteristic of science and philosophical questions about the fact of existence itself (a distinction lost on those who think that the universe as a whole, or matter-energy, or anything else that exists, might adequately explain its own being).135

It was not something called "religion" distinguished from the rest of life, but rather all of life lived in a certain way.

Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?

Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure.

Who Needs the Taj Mahal when it's a drag to live at all?

Mark Twain said, "If one truly believes there is an all-powerful Deity, and one looks around at the condition of the universe, one is led inescapably to the conclusion that God is a malign thug." That's the quote that caused me to write "The Deathbird." It's a puzzle I cannot reason out.

None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even why he had made us virtually immortal …

Er zeigte ihnen, dass ihre Unsterblichkeit verglichen mit seiner eigenen ein alberner Witz war.

Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, "condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.