Quotes About Existence

What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?… The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

When the presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, divine life is pouring into the world.

Where am I? Where am I in relation to God, to myself, and to others? These are the basic questions of human life.

Vina e un vis, mila e singura realitate.

No one needs a watch. What we need is time.

If he were to come away with anything from this schedule, it would be that his life revolved around food and little else. It didn't feel like a meaningless existence, but perhaps that's what happened when you lived alone long enough. When you no longer noticed the silence. Or felt the cold.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition.

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe.

The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.

A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity.

Every human activity is a tack for killing time,

This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next.

No one in a productive society wants you to know there ways of looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects drugs may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads around them have become habituated.

one must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise.

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know

Man is a self-conscious Nothing,

What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?

And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And, all said, we must face up to it: horror is more real than we are.

If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.

As I drifted along with my bodiless invisibility, I felt myself more and more becoming an empty, floating shape, seeing without being seen and walking without the interference of those grosser creatures who shared my world. It was not an experience completely without interest or even pleasure. The clown's shibboleth of "here we are again" took on a new meaning for me as I felt myself a novitiate of a more rarified order of harlequinry. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin")

We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.