Quotes About Existence

Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.

Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important?

Delivered helpless and amazed From the womb of the All, I am waiting dazed For memory to be erased. Then I shall know the Elysium That lies outside the monstrous womb Of time from out of which I come.

Ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

She was old; millions of years old, she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more.

It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.

Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

Sabemos hacer cosas pero no sabemos vivir. Es curioso ese rasgo familiar.

The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.

The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.

I want to find you, where you don't know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly.

Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.

She was nobody, there was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she must apply herself to it.

He seemed so old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.

Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so beautifully out of contact.

To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like BEING. To be alive, to be urgent and insistent--that was NOT-TO-BE. The highest of all was to melt out into the darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being.

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

You're spending your life without renewing it.

But so many people... have only got their minds tacked on to their physical corpses.

What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.

I look at my hands, and wonder what they are doing there. That water there ripples right through me. I'm sure that I am that rippling. It runs right through me, and I through it. There are no barriers between us... A sort of disseminates consciousness, that's all there is of me. I feel as if my body were laying empty, as if I were in the other things - clouds and water-... the individual bodily me is discarded. But if so then I am not alive here. I'm sure it would destroy me.

We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth.

She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.

Just to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have it. Money you have to have. You needn't really have anything else. So that's that! Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the rest you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that's that!