Quotes About Existence

What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!

Man lives in a world of meaning.

Whether happy or unhappy, life is the only treasure man possesses.

The world, an entity out of everything, was created by none of the gods or men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and reg- ularly becoming extinguished.

It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.

Man needs to suffer. When he does not have real griefs he creates them.

Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.

The whole existence of man is a ceaseless duel between the forces of life and death.

Suicide thwarts the plan of the entity which sends out the personality. Fortunately, the entity is far beyond the reach of man's destructive tendencies.

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.

Enoch...why are you here? Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical bodi in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?

Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.

every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme—of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme.

The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.

Among geeks, the cool-soundingness of the acronym is more important than the existence of what it refers to.

After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage

The question is, how long does Mr. Spinny have to live? And what does that tell us?

This might sound like a foolish thing to have done, but a woman who has no family and few friends is forever skirting the edges of a profound despair, which derives from the fear that she could vanish from the world and leave no trace she had ever existed; that the things she has done shall be of no account and the perceptions she has formed [as of Dr. von Pfung for example] shall be swallowed up like a cry in a dark woods.

The total number of living humans was now sixteen.

no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

Se podían haber planteado todo tipo de argumentos filosóficos sobre si ese enfoque era mejor o peor que lo que estaban haciendo en realidad, pero, en el fondo, la filosofía no contaba demasiado.

Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies.