Quotes About Existence

I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.

It was a curious thing that I who lacked all ability to become "comme il faut," should have assimilated the idea so completely as I did. Possibly it was the fact that it had cost me such enormous labour to acquire that brought about its strenuous development in my mind. I hardly like to think how much of the best and most valuable time of my first sixteen years of existence I wasted upon its acquisition.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all? There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: "You'll die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking." But dying was also dreadful.

Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!

Life is a dream, death is an awakening.

Understand that this isn't love. I have been in love but this is not the same. This is not my feeling, but some external force taking possession of me. I left because I decided it could not be, you understand, like a happiness that doesn't exist on earth; but I have struggled with myself and I see that without it there is no life.

that in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim through love.

El error consistía en que había atribuido a la vida en general una respuesta dirigida sólo a mí. Me preguntaba qué era mi vida, y recibía por respuesta que era un mal y una absurdidad. Y ciertamente, mi existencia, consagrada a la complacencia de mis deseos, era absurda y mala, y la afirmación de que la vida es mala y absurda sólo se refería a la mía propia y no a la vida en general.

The answer was: "You'll die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking.

The further back he looked, the more life there had been in him; both the more sweetness to life, and the more of life itself. And the two tendencies had become firmly intertwined.

Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.

Time is an illusion of life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.

The most solemn mystery in the world continued

What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?

Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whomsoever it gives them, every such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death.

At the fact that I'm unable to think up a situation in which life would not be suffering, that we're all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you do?

Every answer from faith gives the finite existence of man a meaning of the infinite - a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, privations and death. That means in faith alone can one find the meaning and potential of life.

Yes, life was there and now it's going, going, and I can't hold onto it.

except life's usual answer to the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: live in the needs of the day, that is find forgetfulness.

I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten-death.

We must live. We must love. And we must believe that there's more to it all than our lives on this scrap of earth.

every man was conscious of his own insignificance, aware that he was but a grain of sand in that ocean of humanity, and yet at the same time had a sense of power as a part of that vast whole.

Tudo aquilo de que viveste e de que vives é uma mentira, um embuste, que oculta de ti a vida e a morte

But just as the force of gravitation-in itself incomprehensible, though felt by every man- is only so far understood by us as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject, so too the force of free will, unthinkable in itself, but recognized by the consciousness of every man, is only so far understood as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject.