Quotes About Existence

Life is smoke, plain and simple; we just fool ourselves that it's otherwise. All it takes is one good gust and we float away and disappear, leaving behind only the scent of our passing in the form of memories.

Real people are messy and complicated and generally inconvenient, but at least they are there

There seemed nothing to do but live.

What is there in thee, Man, that can be known? Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought, A phantom dim of past and future wrought, Vain sister of the worm ...

And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back garden…man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentials.

The Outsider is he who cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'.

And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetite.

Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity.

Man lives and evolves by 'eating' significance, as a child eats food. The deeper his sense of wonder, the wider his curiosity, the stronger his vitality becomes, and the more powerful his grip on his own existence.

I love life and I want to live, to cry but cannot—I feel such a pain in my soul—a pain which frightens me. My soul is ill. My soul, not my mind. The doctors do not understand my illness.... Everybody who reads these lines will suffer.... My body is not ill, it is my soul that is ill.

I think everyone should love life above everything else in the world,' Alyosha tells him. 'Love life regardless of the meaning of it?' 'Certainly—it must be regardless of logic—'it's only then one can understand its meaning.

he has explored life from end to end and found it all hollow, when actually he is only constipated with his own worthless-ness. He fails to apply his intellect to the question, Why do all living things prefer life to death?

someone condemned to death says, or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on a high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than die at once. Only to live, to live and live. Life, whatever it may be...

You might say that the scientist is nothing more than a glorified accident-investigator. And the accident-investigator is himself the product of accident. But man is more deeply moved by meaning than by accident.

The Outsider is he who cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'. It is still a question of self-expression.

it must be remembered that we are looking at these things from the Outsider's point of view, and it is Roquentin who condemns men who think their existence is necessary as salauds. The Outsider's business is to discriminate between real and unreal, necessary and unnecessary.

It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.

The only time early bloomer has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.

They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A's and the C's tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape.

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.