Quotes About Existence

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

You are -- your life, and nothing else.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning.

On a personal level, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that, sooner or later, we will die. And yet today no aspect of human existence, not even the ending of it, is immune to the hegemonic pretensions of neoclassical economic thought. Not only the intellectual poverty, but also the emotional poverty, of what it has to say about death give us little reason to believe that it will be able to face up to the fact of its own mortality. 4.

On this view, God is the cause of physical evil. The question arose, then, whether He is also the cause of sin and of moral evil; and, if so, how He could have invented the very thing that corrupts His creation. The attempt to vindicate God's will was called theodicy in Greek, and it is this term that is traditionally used to refer to all human attempts to justify the existence of evil in a world that has been perfectly made. Theodicies

The depth of our compassion is proportional to the depth of our living. (65)

Quoting Father Seraphim: Our life hangs only by a breath. It is the thread that links you to the Father, the Source, which brought you into being. Be conscious of this thread, and go where you will. (27)

Pain is sometimes the cost of a meaningful existence. I can handle that.

Maybe the meaning of your life is what your life means to you now. It's hard to understand that time doesn't exist because we have such a clear experience of past, present and future, but we don't really experience past and future, only present. Past and future are just ideas in the present. This means that there is only now, but what is now? We can't say what now is because there is no not-now. It's always now. There is only now.

What do we know for sure? That's the real question. That's what the cogito is. That's what solipsism is. This isn't theory. This isn't belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It's all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It's truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion.

What do you know? The answer is: I Am.

All fear is ultimately fear of no-self. "And what is enlightenment," I ask Sarah, "but a swan dive into the abyss of no-self?

One who has seen his true nature no longer regards life as being full of menace and misery as most people do. His previously mistaken sense of personal volition and responsibility has disappeared in such freedom and joy that life is now just an amusing spectacle like a game or a dream, in which he has no real part. Ramesh Balsekar