Quotes About Existence

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

My body is but the lees of my better being.

Doesn't the devil live forever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any person wearing mourning for the devil?

For backward or forward, eternity is the same; already have we been the nothing we dread to be.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the life-time of his God?

But this whole world is a preposterous one, with many preposterous people in it.

Verily there is nothing new under the sun.

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.

Man and boy, I have lived ever since I can remember.

How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!

Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life.

Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death.

Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then!

and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.

A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.

It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Over Descartian vortices you hover.

Oh! How immaterial are all materials!