Quotes About Existence

Il faut abandonner l'illusion qu'elle [la philosophie] pourrait retenir l'essence dans la finitude de ses déterminations.

The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one's own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell.

What does it really matter?' is a line we like to associate with bourgeois callousness, but it is the line most likely to make the individual aware, without dread, of the insignificance of his existence. The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one's distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists.

Life is conceived as a vast supermarket through which one moves with one's shopping trolley, fetching down ways of life from shelves marked "Existential choices.

the only way to eliminate hypocrisy from human existence is to abandon all principles whatsoever;

If humankind, as T. S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it seems that it can bear any amount of unreality.

the throwing of tantrums must stand guarantor of life's significance and meaning.

Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death. The answer is obviously no, it isn't winning: the one fundamental rule of human existence remains, unfortunately, one man one death.

I study the lives on a leaf: the littleSleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes,Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds,Squirmers in bogs,And bacterial creepers.

In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

What falls away is always. And is near.

The worst of all fears is the fear of living

We are nothing if we are not the sum total of our physique and the history of the actions of our physique--that we carry with us in body and in memory. (Body - Michael McClure)

THE DAY The day was a year at first When children played in the garden; The day shrank down to a month When the boys played ball; The day was a week thereafter When young men walked in the garden; the day was itself a day when love grew tall the day shrank down to an hour when old man limped in the garden The day will last forever When it is nothing at all.

The best of all things for earthly men is not to be born and not to see the beams of the bright sun; but if born, then as quickly as possible to pass the gates of Hades, and to lie deep buried.

The Maestro spoke again. "When we are not, at what point do we become?" I could not reply. For I had grasped no shape of his thoughts. I understood neither what he said nor his intent behind it.

Suffering is the common lot of man.

time only exists to stop everything happening at once.

I don't want pills. I don't want an artificial existence." But

Is that the way you get through life? By not thinking?" she asked. "Works for me." She couldn't imagine living like that. Just existing. For her, life was analyzing things. Life was reactions. And emotions. She

She was living in another dimension. It was lonely there. She

Life is available only in the present moment.

I promise myself that I will enjoy every minute of the day that is given me to live.

Une poussière de petits souvenirs insignifiants qui traçaient malgré tout, en s'enchevêtrant les uns aux autres, la trame d'une vie. Celle de Dimeglio, inspecteur principal à la Brigade criminelle, indice 320. Une vie sans histoires.