Quotes About Existence

What did beauty matter, anyway?

The world is what it is.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

God gave us orifices, God gave us wounds.

The clock is impotent; mechanical time does not affect those living in an eternal present.

Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist.

Who would want to live in a world that is just not quite fatal?

As a consequence of Wittgenstein's philosophy, the questions once asked by philosophy have now passed into the realms of poetry. The way poetry is going, it looks as if they won't be asked much longer here either. We have learned to do without God, and it looks as if we will learn to do without philosophy. It will now, alas, join the ranks of subjects which are completed (and have become completely spurious), such as alchemy, astrology, platonic love, and stylitism.

Imagine feeling empty, virtually without a self. Now think about admitting that what little self you can recognize has something wrong with it. To many people with BPD, this is like ceasing to exist—a terrifying feeling for anyone.

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God.

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.

Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.

the courage to die is the test of the courage to be.

Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.

The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself.

Man is essentially 'finite freedom'; freedom not in the sense of indeterminacy but in the sense of being able to determine himself through decisions in the center of his being. Man, as finite freedom, is free within the contingencies of his finitude. But within these limits he is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become, to fulfill his destiny.

Truth without the way to truth is dead.

It is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself. (139)

The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations.

Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. God is not God without universal participation. "Personal God" is a confusing symbol.

Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind.

Being human means asking the questions of one's own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one's own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers.