Quotes About Existence

That's not serious, it's just human.

I'm getting sick of pretending to be excited every time it's somebody's birthday. What is the big deal? How many times do we have to celebrate that someone was born? Every year, over and over. All you did was not die for twelve months. That's all you've done, as far as I can tell.

I'm erased. I'm gone. I'm nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl…. And… I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I'm not outside my world anymore, and I'm not really inside it either. The thing is, there's no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.

Para vivir hay que aprender a mirar la muerte con cierta indiferencia. No hay que dedicar a los muertos demasiados sentimientos ni pensar en ellos en exceso. No lo necesitan. No necesitan nada. No existen. Sólo los vivos existen.

Un sentimiento de absurdo, tétrico y grotesco: he aquí la única verdad estúpida que había quedado después de todas sus experiencias. La vida entera parecía no tener más significado que un puñado de arena. Bastaba con abrir los dedos para que no quedara nada.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

What business does memory have with time?

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. —Milan Kundera

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

We deceive ourselves into thinking life is long, but fire reminds us—it is a flickering. Life is a flickering—and then it is gone. So, we must make the most of it.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn't what is or what was.

it is not just a matter of feeling—how can this go right, what can I do to make this right, but there is also this other thing—that you think, life is truly absurd, and there really is no meaning, only objects of various size colliding in space, if they are so lucky as to be near each other.

We deceive ourselves into thinking life is long, but fire reminds us-it is flickering. Life is a flickering-and then it is gone. So, we must make the most of it. Fire is red. It is yellow. It is blue. It is black as ash, brown as seared lines on timbers. Fire is the pink of flesh, and the gray of smoke that trails. Fire is the all-color that dwells before color, that which comes when one feels a fire will be set...

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, and then to see what it is. I believe in trying to understand love through other loves, other loves that have existed before. Many people have made the records of these loves. These records can be found. They can be read. Some are songs. Some are just photographs. Most are stories.

I was wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. Everyday life is the province of death. It is where all dying takes place--for the extraordinary lands we imagine simply do not exist. There is only the ordinary. It is what we inhabit, and when death comes to find us it is there that he looks.

Are humans spiritual beings who transcend this planet? Or just fuck-ups trashing the earth?

No need, no, need. Life is already too short to find it.

Wind does not need translation. It speaks the language of men, of animals and birds, of rocks and trees and earth and sky and water. It does not eat or sleep, or take shelter from the weather. It is the weather. And it lives.

It is true no one except me can see her or hear her, but that doesn't mean I dreamed her up. [...] But if she's not imaginary, she's not quite real either.

Why should I bring happiness to those I loathe by obliterating myself, when I can make them miserable just by existing?

Human existence begins when the lack of fixation of action by instincts exceeds a certain point; when the adaptation to nature loses its coercive character; when the way to act is no longer fixed by hereditarily given mechanisms. In other words, human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable. Freedom is here used not in its positive sense of freedom to but in its negative sense of freedom from, namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions.

Der Mensch sieht sich - zu allen Zeiten und in allen Kulturen - vor das Problem der Lösung der einen und immer gleichen Frage gestellt: wie er sein Abgetrenntsein überwinden, wie er zur Vereinigung gelangen, wie er sein eigenes einzelnes Leben transzendieren und das Einswerden erreichen kann.

Das Denken kann uns nur zur Erkenntnis führen, dass es selsbt uns die letzte Antwort nicht geben kann.