Quotes About Existence

I consider the luck of simply being born, of being plucked out of the cosmos and bestowed with eyes to see, and nerves to feel, and ears to hear. Our senses. Our speech. Our breath. How crucial and insistent our ceaseless moving lungs from our first cry to our last.

No existence is more contemptible than that, which is embittered by fear.

It seemed as if his desire of her affection increased with his knowledge of the loss of it; and the very circumstance which should have roused his aversion, by a strange perversity of disposition, appeared to heighten his passion, and to make him think it impossible he could exist without her.

I am. I think. I will. ... What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.

Never having been dead, it was merely speculation.

Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.

His teachings, said his disciple Musaeus, had one simple theme: 'Everything comes into being from the One and is resolved into the One again.

Now that you're there, where everything is known—tell me: What else lived in that house besides us?

I live for two things in life: gossip and metaphysics.

Divine angel, who betrothed us Secretly on winter morn, From our sadness-free existence Does not take his darkened eyes. For this reason we love sky, And fresh wind, and air so thin, And the dark tree branches Behind fence of iron. For this reason we love the strict, Many-watered, and dark city, And we love the parting, And brief meetings' hour.

I cannot tell if the day; is ending, or the world, or if; the secret of secrets is inside me again.

Lots of people haven't done anything,' said longest friend. 'And still they're not doing it, will always be not doing it, in their private coffins down at the usual place.

We are always getting ready to live, and never having time enough to live.

She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.

This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

Even a painful longing is some form of presence. from "A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook," trans. Clare Cavanagh, Poetry (1 May 2012)

We create eternity out of crumbs of time.

The immense light. A state of inner emergency and waiting...This luminosity does not negate reason or any rational sense. It simply exists. A kind of poetic sensibility open to the world. To everything--grand and small.

Okazuje si?, ?e nie ma nic trudniejszego ni? by?. Podejrzewa?em to. Cz?owiek podpiera si? ca?? swoj? krz?tanin?, beznadziejnym poczuciem obowi?zku, pracowito?ci?, która jest tylko tchórzostwem, l?kiem przed samym byciem.

I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing.

The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation. All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now'.

All I wanted then was for everything to go on as before, so that I could stay deeply asleep, and be no more than a hole in space, not here or anywhere at all, for as long as possible, preferably forever.

What hand unseen Impells me onward through the glowing orbs Of habitable nature, far remote, To the dread confines of eternal night, To solitudes of vast unpeopled space, To deserts of creation, wide and wild; Where embryo systems and unkindled suns Sleep in the womb of chaos?