Quotes About Existence

There is nothing new under the sun.

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being.

An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.

Perfection does not exist. To understand this is the triumph of human intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.

Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

All this of Pot and Potter - Tell me then, Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going down on one's knees and thanking him.

To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.

God made me on a morning when he had nothing else to do.

A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

All our interior world is reality - and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.

I like reality. It tastes of bread.

I survived. (J'ai vecu.)

There is just one life for each of us: our own.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

While you cannot resolve what you are, at last you will be nothing.

Our concern must be to live while we're alive ... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Man is not born to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out what he has to do ... within the limits of his comprehension.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants, lives so as to give a meaning and a value to his own life.