Quotes About Existence

Often I wonder to what extent a mortal's love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I'll never quite understand.

Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.

Time, as our species has lived it on this planet, will cease to exist. No more dark/light binary. No more active red daytime, blue evening dissolving. No longer is sunshine the coagulant of consciousness, causing us to clot into personalities, to cohere once more on our pillows each morning.

Death isn't the problem. Fear is. And fear is something we create." Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear

however, we start with the presumption that all life is a gift, then gratitude is not an occasional moment when we remember to say thank you to a spouse or to a service provider. Instead, it creates a way of living that acknowledges human neediness and dependency as unavoidable. Gratitude, then, becomes as normal as breathing.

On questions relating to the human condition, no single metaphor has all the answers.

God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?

Everybody dies. But not everybody lives.

And is this not the very reason for the establishment of the State? If there were cause and reason for confidence among individuals, the State would never have come into existence. The sacred and essential foundation for the State is our mutual and well-founded suspicion of each other. Anyone questioning this foundation throws suspicion upon the State.

It's hard, to live in the present. Right this minute. We spend most of our time in the past. Or in the future…about half in each. But to live in the present! Hardly anybody can do it.

Maja sighed and cleared away the glasses and plates. "Artists certainly aren't easy people." "No," Eva giggled. "but somebody's got to take the trouble to emphasize the depths of existence. So that the rest of you have a surface to skate over.

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise.

The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been lamed and broken an half-blinded by the scandal of life, is as such the existentially godless man.

The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.

Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.

Truth and reality split apart.

Crucial for man is his attitude toward failure: whether it remains hidden from him and overwhelms him only objectively at the end or whether he perceives it unobscured as the constant limit of his existence; whether he snatches at fantastic solutions and consolations or faces it honestly, in silence before the unfathomable. The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.

Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz.

To philosophize is to learn to die – philosophizing is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being. "Philosophy and Science", World Review Magazine (March 1950).

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

I am nothing but I must be everything.