Quotes About Existence

L'élan vital [the vital spirit].

… the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

Materiality begets oblivion.

For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating one's self endlessly.

Darwin's theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though

usually when we speak of time we think of the measurement of duration, and not of duration itself. But this duration which science eliminates, and which is so difficult to conceive and express, is what one feels and lives.

In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.

By the sole fact of being accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the indefinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a possible. From this results an error which vitiates our conception of the past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occasion

Useful professions are clearly meant for the public, but those whose utility is more dubious can only justify their existence by assuming that the public is meant for them.

Mais l'idée que le monde entier, y compris les êtres vivants, relève de la mathématique pure, n'est qu'une vue a priori de l'esprit, qui remonte aux cartésiens.

Mais, si le souvenir n'a pas été emmagasiné par le cerveau, où donc se conserve-t-il ? - A vrai dire, je ne suis pas sûr que la question "où" ait encore un sens quand on ne parle plus d'un corps.

The theory of knowledge is inseparable from the theory of life. They must unite so that each may move the other forward.

In realtà, ogni momento della nostra vita è creazione; per un essere cosciente, "esistere" significa cambiare; cambiare nel maturarsi; e maturarsi nel creare se stesso all'infinito.

Life is once, forever.

Reality always falls short of essence. Every child knows that.

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day.

A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence!

There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.

Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.

I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me -- and this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world.

The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.

And so, perhaps, I must once again accept what I used to suspect about my birth: that I had been here many times before and would come again regardless of how unhappily, unwillingly, and to exactly this same place.