Quotes About Existence

He ceased to be a person so that he could remain a successful organism.

What a relief, what an unburdening to have closed the book on humankind.

Everyone prefers to continue their existence as a mind and a self, no matter what pain it causes them, no matter how false and unreal they might be, than to face the quite obvious reality and being only a body set in motion by this mindless, soulless, and selfless force which he designated the shadow, the darkness.

Even if this little account of mine, this little chronicle seems to disclose secrets that might undermine the nightmarish order of things, it does nothing but support and promulgate that order. Nothing can resist or betray this nightmare because nothing exists that might do anything, that might be anything that could realize a success in that way. The very idea of such a thing is only nonsense and dreams.

The universe is not just meaningless, but malignantly useless.

Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.

And my mind - another disease, the disease of a disease. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism.

When you're on your last legs, whether you're confined to a bed or screaming in a crashed-up car, many things may occur to you. Something that won't occur to you, either confined to a bed or screaming, is that it doesn't matter what you did or didn't do during your existence.

To wail adamantly that a god exists is to kill that god or turn it into a plastic idol. To say that a god might exist is to vivify it with the meaning of mystery.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else. But even though you cannot demonstrate the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what the audience thinks.

What Ascrobius sought,' the doctor explained, 'was not a remedy for his physical disease, not a cure in any usual sense of the word. What he sought was an absolute annulment , not only of his disease but of his entire existence. On rare occasions he even spoke to me', the doctor said, 'about the uncreation of his whole life.

Consciousness makes it seem as if (1) there is something to do; (2) there is somewhere to go; (3) there is something to be; (4) there is someone to know.

The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous.

The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

the finale is always the same: simple heart failure. And all the time you thought that life was so complex.

But some people seem born to bellyache that being alive is not all right. Should they vent this posture in philosophical or literary works, they may do so without anxiety that their efforts will have an excess of admirers.

To state this matter in the most lucid terms: each of these hyper-organisms, even as they scintillated with an obscene degree of vital impulses, also, and at the same time, had degeneracy and death written deeply upon them.

Who knows how many others there were who might say that their existence consisted of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense, a nonsense that had nothing unique about it at all and that had nothing behind it or beyond it except more and more nonsense—a new order of nonsense, perhaps an utterly unknown nonsense, but all of it nonsense and nothing but nonsense.

Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that is, in fact, real.

as British economist John Maynard Keynes reportedly stated, "we are all dead.

Only after everyone who ever remembered you is gone for good and all does the terrible insanity that once bore your name achieve a true oblivion. Good-bye.

What was that all about!' (In this sense the world of the company mirrored the world itself, which sometimes managed to stage a rousing first act, and perhaps even provide a few engaging scenes of a second before devolving into a playwright's nightmare, wherein the actors either butchered their lines or entirely forgot them, scenery collapsed, props misfired, and most of the audience left the theater during intermission.)

Life is a nightmare that leaves it's mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.