Quotes About Existence

Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Cuànto nos hemos esmerado para conservar intacta nuestra ignorancia, para lanzarnos en brazos de una libertad, de una despreocupaciòn, de una imprudencia, de un entusiasmo y de una alegrìa de vivir casi inconcebibles, para gozar de la vida!

I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person.

De hecho, lo raro y excepcional es estar vivo.

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.

But my sadness is comforting Because it's right and natural And because it's what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don't even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn't mine: it's me.

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.

We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong.

Se depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia, não há nada mais simples. Têm só duas datas: a da minha nascença e a da minha morte. Entre uma e outra coisa, todos os dias são meus

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as "flesh and blood." In fact "flesh and blood" describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate.

I am nothing. I will never be anything. I cannot wish to be anything. Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.