Quotes About Existence

Hume decreed that "Liberty is the perfection of society," but believed equally that "authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom's] very existence.

It is time to stop making excuses. We need an enriched approach to doing economic research, one that acknowledges the existence and relevance of Humans.

Very few of us in our saner moments believe that the particular postulates that some logicians have dreamed up create the numbers - no, most of us believe that the real numbers are simply there and that it has been an interesting, amusing, and important game to try to find a nice set of postulates to account for them.

All of us, each and every one, lives a life that is, in its own right, an epic.

The past does not exist. The future does not exist. One should concentrate the mind on the present moment.

All things came from Me and all things will return to Me. Split the timber and there I Am. Lift a stone and you will discover Me there.

Into this life of cruel wonder sent, Without a word to tell us what it meant, Sent back again without a reason why - Birth, life, and death - 'twas all astonishment.

To all of us the thought of heaven is dear - Why not be sure of it and make it here? No doubt there is a heaven yonder too, But 'tis so far away - and you are near. Men talk of heaven, - there is no heaven but here; Men talk of hell, - there is no hell but here; Men of hereafters talk, and future lives, O love, there is no other life - but here.

Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually.

The pleasure of being alive is brought into sharper focus when you need to pay attention to staying alive.

Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn't drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder

Yet, despite all, it is a difficult thing to admit the existence of ghosts in a coldly factual world. One's very instincts rebel at the admission of such maddening possibility. For, once the initial step is made into the supernatural, there is no turning back, no knowing where the strange road leads except that it is quite unknown and quite terrible. (Slaughter House)

Does a man's existence change in any way when he removes his overcoat? Neither does it change when death removes the overcoat of his body. He's still the same person. No wiser. No happier. No better off. Exactly the same. "Death is merely continuation at another level.

Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!

For everything in life, there's a counterpart in afterlife. This includes the most beautiful as well as the ugliest of phenomena.

When matter is put aside, all creation becomes exclusively mental, that's all.

Time had lost its multidimensional scope. There was only the present for Robert Neville; a present based on dayto-day survival, marked by neither heights of joy nor depths of despair. I am predominantly vegetable, he often thought to himself. That was the way he wanted it

From that day on he learned to accept the dungeon he existed in, neither seeking to escape with sudden derring-do nor beating his pate bloody on its walls. And, thus resigned, he returned to work.

Still alive, he thought, heart beating senselessly, veins running without point, bones and muscles and tissue all alive and functioning with no purpose at all.

Maurice Nicoll says all history is a living today. We are not enjoying one spark of life in a huge, dead waste. We are, instead, existing at one point "in a vast process of the living who still think and feel but are invisible to us.

What did it matter what he did? Life would be equally purposeless no matter what his decision was.

Richard Matheson

Jetzt wusste er, dass sie tatsächlich Angst vor ihm hatten, so wie seinesgleichen einst Angst vor ihnen gehabt hatte, den schrecklichen Gestalten der Legende. Für sie war er die Geißel der Menschheit, der neuen Gesellschaft [...] Für sie war er bisher ein unsichtbares Schreckgespenst gewesen, das als grauenvollen Beweis seiner Existenz die blutleeren Leichen derer, die sie liebten, zurückgelassen hatte. [...] Ich bin Legende!

And it does occur to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any cave painter suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life.