Quotes About Existence

I am a man. And I am former baby and a future skeleton, and I am a distant future pile of dust.

What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.

Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.

The great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.

I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Men are the dreams of a shadow.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart from God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call.

There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one

The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.

Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.

Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

The lot of man - to suffer and to die.

So man, who here seems principal alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; 'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Say first, of god above or man below; what can we reason but from what we know.

Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.

Man is a living lie--a bitter jest Upon himself--a conscious grain of sand Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.