Quotes About Existence

for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.

It's meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning--or the lack of it--in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning.

There is no death. There are only different levels of life.

Ah, Gwendolyn, while it may be true that "everyday existence' is the tirl of dull, repetitive activities that you infer, it's just one layer of a many-layered cake; and if it seems an exercise in pointless mediocrity, maybe that's only because most who live it are too narrowly focused to perceive its underlying kaleidoscopic density.

What is the 'direction' of the Earth in its journey; where are the atoms 'going' when they spin?

Whether meaningful or meaningless, the game of life is there to be played - and the animal in his animal way seems to know it and the cage is an offense to what his inner animal voice tells him is right and true.

human reality is often simultaneously somber and funny.

Pan is right," he thought. "Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

You don't mind? Life is in the minding.

You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes.

No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen ---it's not gasps and blood and falling about---that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all ---now you see him, now you don't, that the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back---an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

How is a juggler you can't hear or see or smell or touch different to no juggler at all?

Mind reedetakse igal sammul. Ma ei usu inimesse, ja sina tahad, et ma usuksin jumalasse.

That's it then, is it? What was it all about? When did it begin?

After Magritte often serves as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound, which I think is appropriate in at least one way: neither play is about anything grander than itself. A

We live amidst absurdity, so close to it that it escapes our notice.

Do you think death could possibly be a boat? No, no, no...death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. I've frequently not been on boats. No, no no - what you've been is not on boats.