Quotes About Existence

God] is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him, and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. (190)

Le courage d'être s'enracine dans le Dieu qui apparaît quand Dieu a disparu dans l'angoisse du doute.

Spiritual self-affirmation occurs in every moment in which man lives creatively in the various spheres of meaning.

God is always revived in something or somebody; He cannot be murdered. The story of every atheism is the same.

Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being

Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity.

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Astonishment is the root of philosophy.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

The question our century puts before us is: is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the Holy, the dimension which cuts through the world of subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not world but is the Mystery of the Ground of Being.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly

to live means to lack something at every moment

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.

We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce.

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which your indefinite duration has the subsistence and eternity of a smoke-ring.