Quotes About Existence

For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence. The

we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.

yet men die miserably every day

Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table; it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.

We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectability of existence

this is the one world we will ever know. 5.

We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology . . . But when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day

Time abbreviated itself, like an accordion that is lived in extension but remembered only in contraction.

When I consider … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me ['l'infinie immensité des espaces que j'ignore et qui m'ignorent'], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? Pascal, Pensées

when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

At eighty, things do not occur; they recur.

A woman feels a man inside her and feels life. The act they engage in is the one from which all life springs, and for that moment they can feel that they are living, not dying.

She was simply numb, her mind having absorbed all the fear it could, like a sponge saturated with water: after a while the fear became a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.

Part of you thinks that you are not going to die because part of you is not going to die.

You are not here to work. You are here to awaken.

El novelista Ray Cummings dice que el tiempo es «lo que evita que todo suceda a la vez». Todo lo que ha existido alguna vez, sigue existiendo, existirá, y todo lo que podría existir, existe ahora. El

El Amor, que es lo que me creó, es lo que soy.

En la eternidad las demoras no importan, pero en el tiempo son ciertamente trágicas». (T-5.VI.1:3).

In discovering that half of his biological heritage consisted of nothing more than an impersonal concoction of designer proteins, artificially leveraged by indifferent scientists to produce a zygote that when matured would, they hoped, display certain interesting mental abilities, he had felt something fundamental drain out of him. He had been nothing more than a test, an experiment, one among many.

It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilization may be returned to the stability that promotes progress. A stability that existed under the Empire, was reduced to anarchy by the Rebellion, was inherited in turn by the so-called Republic, and will be restored by us. Future historians will look upon this as the time when a strong hand brought the rule of law back to civilization." Mitaka

Mankind must without a doubt be the most conceited race in the universe, for who else believes that God has nothing better to do than sit around all day and help him out of tight spots?" It

I am not frightened of my beliefs. If there is a God who is threatening me with damnation because I don't believe in Him, so be it. I've lived my life in conscience, and I will suffer damnation willingly in conscience against a tyrannical God who would damn me because, on the basis of the intelligence He gave me, I have come to a conclusion doubting His existence, and I will continue to be a skeptic all of my life.

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said