Quotes About Existence

Il resto della notte mi sembra adesso, a lasciarlo tornare nella memoria, un lago senza inizio né fine, dove ogni riflesso è ancora lì a luccicare, ma ogni sponda è perduta, e illeggibile la brezza. So però che non avevo mani, prima di quel lago, né avevo mai respirato in quel modo, insieme a qualcun altro, o smarrito il mio corpo in una pelle che non era la mia.

C'était au reste un de ces hommes qui aiment assister à leur propre vie, considérant comme déplacée toute ambition de la vivre. On aura remarqué que ceux-là contemplent leur destin à la façon dont la plupart des autres contemplent une journée de pluie.

Dire la mer. Parce que c'est tout ce qu'il nous reste. Parce que devant elle, nous sans croix ni vieil homme ni magie, il nous faut bien avoir une arme, quelque chose, pour ne pas mourir dans le silence et c'est tout.

Tardó un poco en decir algo. Pensaba en la misteriosa permanencia del amor, en la corriente nunca quieta de la vida.

You wake, you die.

Melancholy is to know the beauty of life, and to know it must end.

Death is always death, that is oblivion, resting, absence of life, as well as pain.

Death, just like life, has it's secret pains and lust. All in that to know them.

Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...

because love can come, if you believe in it and behave as if it exists. That was the case, too, with free will; with perhaps, fath of any sort; and love was a sort of faith, was it not?

How remarkable it was, she thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world, and that we did so by giving ourselves names and linking those names with places and other people.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow…There must be reasons why the leaves decay. (From Auden's If I Could Tell You

There were plenty of people who did not really believe in God, but who wanted to believe in him, and said that they did. Some people said that these people were foolish, that they were hypocritical, but Mma Ramotswe was not so sure about that. If something, or somebody, could help you to get through life, to lead a life that was good and purposeful, did it matter all that much if that thing or that person did not exist? She thought it did not—not in the slightest bit. BY

His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?

Music and art and philosophy are ultimately based on the premise that this man on his tractor, and these pigs, and the swarms of bees that fertilise the crops, will all continue to do what they do.

that was enough to make her blush with shame for the mere fact that Las Vegas existed. There

we live out our years as best we can, not knowing their number, not really knowing, in the case of most of us, why we do what we do and how we came to be where we are; thinking we know it, but suspecting that we do not really know.

What we have, we all must lose—that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.

Sub specie aeternitatis, she thought: In the context of eternity, this is nothing, as are all our human affairs.

the world was a vale of tears—it always had been.

If people have ghosts, then why shouldn't other things have them? What makes us so special that only we can have ghosts?

Perhaps there was no real point to our existence–or none that we could discern–and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: How can I make my life bearable? We are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue. In that case, the real question to be addressed is: How are we going to make the experience of being here as fulfilling, as good as possible? That

But when all was said and done he thought that there was something beyond us, something other than the human, and that if you closed your eyes and thought about this thing long enough you could hear its voice within you.

Isabel's private theory of moral proximity, the basis of those obligations that came into existence when we found ourselves close enough to others to be able to witness or feel their needs, or when we were in some other way linked to their plight. We could not deal with all the suffering or need in the world, but we could—and should—deal with that sliver of suffering that was reasonably close to us.