Quotes About Existence

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive and thinking is killing me

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live.

From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy.

Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening.

It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live.

It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

Nothing is beautiful and true.

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What so great about feeling and dreaming?

There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.

I think after you live it's like before you lived.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.

There was a single thought in my head: Keep thinking. Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive, and thinking is killing me. I think and think and think.

I just couldn't be dead any longer.

I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life [...]

The absurdity of it, the agony and beauty of it, almost brought Jacob to his knees: these two independent consciousnesses, neither of which existed ten and a half years ago, and existed only because of him, could now not only operate free of him (that much he'd known for a long time), but demand freedom.

des verstorbenen Philosophen Pinchas T., der in seiner einzigen bedeutenden Abhandlung An den Staub: vom Menschen bist du, und zum Menschen sollst du werden argumentierte, es sei theoretisch möglich, das Leben und die Kunst gegeneinander auszutauschen.

We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.

It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we only have one life

I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed. p. 233