Quotes About Existence

Hardship in our present life is an atonement for sins committed in our previous existence, or the education necessary to prepare for a higher place in the life to come.

Hardship in our present life is an atonement for sins committed in our previous existence, or the education necessary to prepare for a higher place in the life to come. That is what your teachers have taught you, haven't they?

We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.

London life made one lazy, he considered. Unfit for real existence.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world's totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas.

I too could go, oh, yes, at a moment's notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying

How strange a thing it was to be here, animate and conscious, on this ball of mud and brine as it whirled through the illimitable depths of space.

Yes, tings endure while the living lapse

Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.

There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it

Yes, things endure, while the living lapse.

Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

Ma ei looda surmajärgsele elule ega jumalusele, kes võiks seda pakkuda. Arvestades, missuguse maailma ta lõi, oleks temasse uskumine jumalavallatus.

No w?a?nie, przedmioty potrafi? przetrwa?, a ?ywi tymczasem znikaj?.

What are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?

The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.

ineluctable laws of which were everywhere at work. This gnosis

To, ?e tu jestem, wynika po prostu z potrzeby, ?eby nigdzie nie by?.

I have achieved nothing, nothing. I am what I always was, alone as always, locked in the same old glass prison of myself.

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think. . . I know what I'm talking about.

There is no way to master the fact with which I live.

we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained.

Love it is that drives and sustains us!' I translate: we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.