Quotes About Existence

The God I do believe in is the God who doesn't care: James Joyce's God who stands back, paring his fingernails.

I think J. S. Bach's music stands among humankind's greatest accomplishments. For me, Bach's music is not only as good as music gets but also as good as it gets, period - as good as existence, reality, life, and the world.

I learned about life from life itself, love I learned in a single kiss and could teach no one anything except that I have lived with something in common among men.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Snake's poison is life to the snake; it is in relation to man that it means "death.

The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac represents the twelve lessons of human existence, the 12 qualities to be developed in the formation of the perfect man (and woman).

God only acts and is, in existing beings or men.

The Way is to man as rivers and lakes are to fish, the natural condition of life.

Man's ethics must not end with man, but should extend to the universe. He must regain the consciousness of the great Chain of Life from which he cannot be separated.

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.

"Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards." In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to "fly upwards".

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

The fate of man is man.

Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.

If we feel the least degradation in being amorous, or merry or hungry, or sleepy, we are so far bad animals & miserable men.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

The years keep coming and going, Men will arise & depart; Only one thing is immortal: The love that is in my heart.

To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.

We die alone, but we live among men.

These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives.