Quotes About Existence

Most of us are content to exist and breed and fight for the right to do both, and the dominant idea, the foredoomed attest to control one's destiny, is reserved for the fortunate or unfortunate few.

As he held her and tasted her, and she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and however pretentious that remark sounds... it is an absolute fact-- so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

There's only one lesson to be learned from life anyway.... That there's no lesson to be learned from life.

In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.

If truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment.

As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence.

If truth is the end of life, happiness is the mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment.

Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball.

Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house.

Art is meaningless in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

What if I do? I've heard you and Maury, and everyone else for whose intellect I have the slightest respect, agree that life as it appears is utterly meaningless. But it's always seemed to me that if I were unconsciously learning something here it might not be so meaningless.

Her affairs had long shared such a sameness, that, as she dried out, they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves. Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.

I don't believe there's any one alive who can contemplate themselves as an impermanent institution, as a luxury or an unnecessary evil. Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin—but they don't, even you and I….

As he helf her and tasted her, and she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

Foarte puÈ›ini dintre cei care subliniaz? inutilitatea vieÈ›ii observ? inutilitatea lor înÈ™ile. Probabil cred c?, proclamând inutilitatea vieÈ›ii, reuÈ™esc s?-È™i salveze propia valoare de la ruin? - dar nu reulÈ™esc.

The "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal shell," and the rest is miscalculation—that is all!...

All he was doing was just sitting around killing time, looking at the birds and waiting to die.

Le temps ne progresse que dans un sens et, qu'on le veuille ou non, il vous entraîne avec lui.

The world of dew is, yes, a world of dew, but even so

There is no such thing as was-only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.

Because lurking somewhere beneath the surface of your brain is a vision of loneliness, and it will be a terrible moment when it breaks through, and you realise that your future is not a green pastures, but the knackers yard. We are all separate people, and we are all alone. It is a ridiculous thing to say that no man is an island. We are all islands. You can die, and Gerry won't. Gerry can die, and you won't. Our lives just go on, separate as they have always been.