Quotes About Existence

Does the cosmic space, we dissolve into, taste of us then?

A ella sólo nosotros la vemos; el animal libre tiene siempre su ocaso detrás de si y ante sí tiene a Dios, y cuando anda, anda en la eternidad, como andan las fuentes. Nosotros nunca tenemos, ni siquiera un solo día, el espacio puro ante nosotros, al que las flores se abren infinitamente.

Between hammers pounding, the heart exists, like the tongue between the teeth—which still, however, does the praising.

Unknowing before the heavens of my life/ I stand in wonder. O the great stars./ The rising and the going down. How quiet./ As if I didn't exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed/ the pure influence? Do high and low tide/ alternate in my blood according to this order?/ I will cast off all wishes, all other links,/ accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better/ it live in the terror of its stars than/ seemingly protected, soothed by something near.

But the living are wrong in the sharp distinctions they make. Angels, it seems, don't always know if they're moving among the living or the dead.

Was berechtigt Sie dann, ihn, welcher niemals war, wie einen Vergangenen zu vermissen und zu suchen, als ob er verloren wäre?

Eines Tages wird das Mädchen da sein und die Frau, deren Name nicht mehr nur einen Gegensatz zum Männlichen bedeuten wird, sondern etwas für sich, etwas, wobei man keine Ergänzung und Grenze denkt, nur an Leben und Dasein - der weibliche Mensch. Dieser Fortschritt wird das Liebe-Erleben, das jetzt voll Irrung ist (...), verwandeln, von Grund aus verändern, zu einer Beziehung umbilden, die von Mensch zu Mensch gemeint ist, nicht mehr von Mann zu Weib.

No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit, als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten; sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde. Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Most events are inexpressible, and take place in a sphere that no word has ever entered. Most inexpressible of all are works of art, existences full of secrets whose life continues alongside ours, while ours is transitory.

I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.

And I love light. Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.

Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.

We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish

What is wrong with this gentleman, Sylvester?' the tall one said. 'A man's dying outside!' I said. 'Someone is always dying,' the other one said. 'Yes, and it's good to die beneath God's great tent of sky.

And yet, it was a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man to hear the silence of sound.

Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a front door as well as a back door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because man is always going to be man....

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.