Quotes About Existence

It is precisely the most subjective ideas which, being closest to nature and to the living being, deserve to be called the truest.

Consciousness is a precondition of being.

A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable.

There are no longer any gods whom we can invoke to help us. The great religions of the world suffer from increasing anemia, because the helpful numina have fled from the woods, rivers, and mountains, and from animals, and the god-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious. There we fool ourselves that they lead an ignominious existence among the relics of our past.

The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness

We are still a long way from understanding what it signifies that nothing has any existence, unless some small - and oh, so transitory - consciousness has become aware of it.

Ah, my brother, you will never know the happiness of thinking nothing and doing nothing. This is the most delightful thing there is, next to sleep. So we were before birth, and so we shall be after death.

Indeed, we must never forget that for us outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive it consciously, and that we cannot prove that it exists "in and by itself.

God is not dead. Now, as ever, he liveth.

There is a sadness in animals' eyes, and we never know whether that sadness is bound up with the soul of the animal or is a poignant message which speaks to us out of that still unconscious existence.

If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?

But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from having no love, only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence.

absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.

How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe…Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.

Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow.

the lined face are pitiless reminders that whether or not we expose ourselves to the destructive forces of life, the poison of the stealthily creeping serpent of time consumes our bodies nonetheless.

How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?

A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending.

Nosotros no suponemos que la mente sea una entidad metafísica, y tampoco pensamos que exista una relación entre la mente individual y una hipotética Mente Universal (Universal Mind). Por ello, nuestra psicología es una ciencia que versa sobre simples fenómenos y se halla absolutamente huérfana de implicaciones metafísicas.

Official criticism participates in the pitiable fate of Proktophantasmist and his lamentation in the Walpurgis-night: "You still are here? Nay, 'tis a thing unheard! Vanish at once ! We've said the enlightening word." Such criticism has omitted to take to heart the truth that all that exists has sufficient right to its existence: no less is it with psychoanalysis.

Por ello, la psicología parte del supuesto de que la mente no puede ni constatar ni demostrar la existencia de aquello que se encuentra fuera de sus fronteras.

Nature knows two fundamentally different ways of adaptation, which determine the further existence of the living organism the one is by increased fertility, accompanied by a relatively small degree of defensive power and individual conservation; the other is by individual equipment of manifold means of self-protection, coupled with a relatively insignificant fertility.

How are you fulfilling your life's task ([your] "mission"), your raison d'être, the meaning and purpose of your existence? This is the question of individuation, the most fateful of all questions. . .

Nothing brings the relentless flight of time and the cruel perishability of all blossoms more painfully to our consciousness than an inactive and empty life.