Quotes About Existence

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.

Reality is the leading cause of stress.

Beyond anything we know to name, there moves a force arising from the pure juxtaposition of things, a force that draws us into being, that allows us to dwell fully in our lives. All pure juxtaposition is a gathering.

We can't fabricate our being, we can only receive it.

Who are we? That is the first question. It is a question almost impossible to answer. But we all agree that the busy self occupied in our daily activities is not quite the real self. We are quite sure we have lost something in the mere pursuit of living.

As Walt Whitman says, "I am sufficient as I am." It is sufficient that I live—and am probably going to live for another few decades—and that human life exists. Viewed that way, the problem becomes amazingly simple and admits of no two answers. What can be the end of human life except the enjoyment of it?

Philosophy not only begins with the individual, but also ends with the individual. For an individual is the final fact of life. He is an end in himself, and not a means to other creations of the human mind. The

There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence.

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

The Republican party think [slavery] wrong--we think it is a moral, a social, and a political wrong. We think it is a wrong not confining itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it is a wrong which in its tendency, to say the least, affects the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong.

I mean, if you have any idea of any kind of complexity or immensity or destiny, of general order, you're put in a position of nothingness. And I think this is true. I don't think I'm anything; I never have thought that. Whatever it is that activates it is a certain kind of energy that goes on. But the effect is ridiculous; it's absurd." --Lincoln Kirstein in "The New Yorker

The one thing the Universe has in excess and is apparent in every molecule of air ever breathed and every atom of every object is potential.

It was reassuring to know exactly where one stood. That one stood at the end of the line was not pertinent. At least there was a line in which to subsist.

I couldn't dream of a future, I couldn't reliably remember my past.

And in the end, we are all just stories

Libra does. Winning an intellectual point or decision, however minor, major—or in the middle—is the reason for the Libra person's very existence, symbolized by the Libra Scales, balanced in perfect harmony and justice.

Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.

Our flesh has never been a boundary for the human being. We only reach out from there to occupy the space around us. Even more significantly, it occupies us.

He wakes up and he is not a halfhearted man and he can't remember why he wakes this way, except that he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place. The

this "is-ness" just some philosophical abstraction? No. Just like the yogis of India, Parmenides says is-ness is consciousness. And everything that exists, even rocks and stones, participates in this living awareness.

The intensity of mattering, while ideologically constructed, is nevertheless always beyond ideological challenge because it is called into existence affectively.

Notre planète étant, selon la définition de Stevenson, une île tournoyante chargée de vie rapace, plus ruisselante de sang qu'un navire au lendemain d'une mutinerie, Hanokh Levin sonde les pulsions mortifères, descend dans le sous-sol humain où grouille un monde de lâcheté et de bassesse, tire des choses vues un constat sur le non-sens de nos existences, engluées dans de risibles ambitions. (p. 117)

The works of the Impressionists, as much as those of any medieval craftsman or renaissance Humanist, are related to a world view, a context of interdependent beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad, true and false, the nature of existence and the means for investigating it. There are no 'value vacuums' in human history, no 'intermediary periods', only periods which are more or less unified, more or less amenable to the procedures, and temperaments, of historians.