Quotes About Existence

I began to think about God. I mean, the notion of a Supreme Being existing somewhere began to creep into my private thoughts. Not because I wanted to strike Him on the face, to punch Him out for what He was about to do to me - to Jenny, that is. No, the kind of religious thoughts I had were just the opposite. Like, when I woke up in the morning and Jenny was there. Still there. I'm sorry, embarrassed even, but I hoped there was a God I could say thank you to.

When night falls people become as lonely as snowflakes floating down from a gray city sky. Now and again we fall past a streetlamp and are visible, a brief moment apart, REAL-- we can be seen. We exist. Then we vanish into the gray darkness and the earth draws us to it.

Everyone chats and smiles, chats about nothing, shouts and drinks themselves silly occasionally or all the time. They they die one fine day, old or young, they die, tucked up into the earth. That's what it's like. Swarming lives, with no meaning, no number.

I never really had any God at all, just an imagined one, an inherited ghost.

L'Ordre est un royaume poétique, une Voie Lactée zébrant le noir profond du ciel. C'est une pléiade qui n'existe que par ses étoiles.

Tu trouves ça normal, Scrofa, d'habiter un monde où c'est la colère qui te rend vivant ?

I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.

Because you make me. Because I didn't exist, not in any way that matters, until I met you.

a colorless chap who's never found himself because there isn't anything to find.

Clinton Foley is living?" "Of course he's living. He's living next door

given another shot at life, I would seize every minute of it ... look at it and really see it ... try it on ... live it ... exhaust it ... and never give that minute back until there was nothing left of it.

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.

Man has a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature... Yet, at the same time... man is a worm and food for worms

To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself.

Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one's life.

Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures.

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence

Sartre has called man a useless passion because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence-how take it away from people and leave them joyous?

It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being.

Human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution; that the Creator may not care any more for the destiny of man or the self-perpetuation of individual men than He seems to have cared for the dinosaurs or the Tasmanians.