Quotes About Existence

Death contradicts ownership and self.

Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.

Why can't you live in the present? You live everywhere but in the present.

The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe.

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

Yet it was not that a rapture or a glory which had once shone around her had passed away from the world. The rapture and the glory whose hauntings she suffered had never manifested themselves in her life at all.

Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can't be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn't exactly a promise . . .

Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of?

We did not exist all that much. We could suffer like mad all the same. Something was there, a wounded complex of resentment and anxiety and pain, something half crushed, something swallowed, not yet digested, and still screaming.

Everything is full of gods

I do wish you could be happy. If I thought you could be happy I could simply cease to exist with a sigh of joy.

I tried to think these thoughts but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real.

There's a kind of reality, a kind of truth.

He felt obscurely the dividedness of his being, the extent of what was gross, the littleness and value of what was not.

Human life is short, we don't exist all that much. A pale brief flicker in the dark.

We're all sinners. We all hurt each other just by existing.

She has lost the instinct for happiness.

Perhaps after all not to have been born is best. How near the human soul must be to nothingness if it can be so tossed.

He did not read. This continued to amaze Ludens who could not imagine existence without reading.

What is God anyway? A dark place —

It's not even like memory. It's all just there. All the time, Willy? Every hour, every minute.

Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.

Eros and Thanatos: a false pair and a true pair.

What a terribly complex thing his life must be to be able so utterly to surprise its owner!