Quotes About Existence

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.

When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren't going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height – even if it was only the illusion of a view – wasn't so bad.

No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.

At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined.

My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet I find it the hardest to begin.

For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as 'death' is no more than the death of old age...The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age.

Io so una cosa per certo: che un tempo oggettivo esiste, ma che esiste anche quello soggettivo, quello che si porta sull'interno polso, proprio accanto alle pulsazioni cardiache. E questo tempo personale, che è poi anche quello autentico, si misura in funzione del nostro rapporto con i ricordi.

We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth.

If I asked you "What is life?", you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence

The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn't have to see your life as any kind of triumph – his own had hardly been that – but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful.

The one thing that is very good in life today is death.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart / 'Tis woman's whole existence.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This

It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us.

She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

Vivimos en el tiempo —nos contiene y nos moldea—, pero nunca he creído comprenderlo muy bien.

Throw off your grief,' such doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

Tek što do?emo na svet, rekao je Flober, ,,a ve? s nas po?nu da otpadaju komadi?i.