Quotes About Existence

Pascal: "When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.

coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.

Democritus (460-360 B.C.)— in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.

Death is the origin of all religions, and perhaps if there had been no death there would have been no gods.

Perhaps our supercilious disgust with existence is a cover for a secret disgust with ourselves: we have botched and bungled our lives, and we cast the blame upon the environment, or the world, which have no tongues to utter a defense.

Our individual separateness is in a sense illusory; we are parts of the great stream of law and cause, parts of God; we are the flitting forms of a being greater than ourselves, and endless while we die. Our bodies are cells in the body of the race, our race is an incident in the drama of life; our minds are the fitful flashes of eternal light.

The world is not "my idea," as Schopenhauer called it; it is a stern reality of which you and I are passing spawns.

Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.

What I am not," he says, most truthfully, "that for me is God

physical philosophers; they had sought for the physis or nature of external things, the laws and constituents of the material and measurable world. That is very good, said Socrates; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become?

Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy has turned into premature death?

The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well.

To rise again - to be the same person that you were - you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man? Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle? Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.

THERE IS A PLEASURE in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

it is a glorious privilege to be alive. Neither scientific analysis nor a multitude of words will describe

Bad and good are prejudices which the eternal reality cannot recognize;

On his desk, when he died, there lay a paper on which he had written his last, and perhaps his most characteristic, sentences: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell.

The truest vision ever had of God came, perhaps, here.

What immortality means to me now is that we are all parts of a whole, cells in the body of life; that the death of the part is the life of the whole; and that though as individuals we pass away, yet the whole is made forever different by what we have done and been.

Spinoza was right: "in so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect it participates in eternity."127

As long as there is poverty there will be gods."32

Sometimes," said Thoreau, "as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be.

The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.