Quotes About Existence

I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.

Deux paroles étroitement serrées l'une contre l'autre, comme deux corps vivants, mais aux limites indécises.

The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.

Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn't speak any more, but is.

Waiting is the awaiting of presence that is not given in waiting, presence that is led, however, to the simple play of presence by wait­ing that withdraws from presence everything that is present it.

By her anguish; she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become. and thus, deep within her, already sealed, already dead, the most profound passion came to be.

On voit que Marcel Bealu se sert des images du sommeil pour nous mettre aux prises avec le sentiment d'énigme qui est pour quelques-uns le sentiment fondamental de l'existence. (p. 594)

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying.

How long this lasted I can't imagine, it wasn't an imaginary time, it also didn't belong to the time  of things that happen.

Los días vividos, pletóricos o vacíos, tranquilos o agitados, son todos por igual días pasados, y la ceniza del pasado pesa lo mismo en todas las manos.

Days lived, whether full or empty, whether busy or serene, are but days gone by, and the ashes of the past weigh the same in every hand. Had

The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

Maurice Maeterlinck

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.

We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.

Our real life is not the life we live, and we feel that our deepest, nay, our most intimate thoughts are quite apart from ourselves, for we are other than our thoughts and our dreams. And it is only at special moments – it may be by merest accident – that we live our own life. Will the day ever dawn when we shall be what we are? …

For what are in reality the things we call 'Wisdom,' 'Virtue,' 'Heroism,' 'sublime hours,' and 'great moments of life,' but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; …

Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.

signs of a life that we cannot explain are everywhere, vibrating by the side of the life of every day.

Are we to believe that earth marks the most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come no farther than this?

We are not wrong, perhaps, to be heedful of justice in the midst of a universe that heeds not at all; as the bee is not wrong to make honey in a world that itself can make none. But we are wrong to desire an external justice, since we know that it does not exist. Let that which is in us suffice. All is for ever being weighed and judged in our soul. It is we who shall judge ourselves; or rather, our happiness is our judge.

A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?" there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, "What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?" And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?