Quotes About Existence

So it isn't I who am master of my life, I am just one of the threads to be woven into life's calico! Well then, even if I cannot spin, I can at least cut the thread in two.

To live in the unconditional, inhaling only the unconditional, is impossible to man; he perishes lioke the fish forced to live in the air. But on the other hand, without relating himself to the unconditional, man cannot in the deepest sense be said to 'live'.

an adventure that every human being has to live through, learning to be anxious so as not to be ruined either by never having been in anxiety or by sinking into it. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.

AÅŸk için her ÅŸey imgedir; ama imge de hakikattir.

It is not truth that rules the world but illusions.

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all–what then would life be but despair?

This emphasis on the situation was particularly important in order to show that what was central for Socrates was not a fixed point but an ubique et nusquam . It was needed in order to point up the Socratic sensibility which under the subtlest and weakest contact immediately discerned the presence of the Idea, immediately felt the electricity pervading the whole existence.

Oleminen ei ole mukavuuskysymys.

For me, nothing is more dangerous than recollection. Once I have recalled some life-situation it ceases to exist. People say that separation helps to revive love. That is quite true, but it revives it purely in a poetic way. A life in recollection is the most perfect imaginable; memory gives you your fill more abundantly than all of reality and has a security which no reality possesses.

Subjectivity is truth

let us speak of the wish and thereby of the sufferings; let us properly linger over this, convinced that one may learn more profoundly and more reliably what the highest is by considering suffering than by observing achievements, where so much that is distracting is present.

What is to come? What does the future hold? I don't know, I have no idea. When from a fixed point a spider plunges down as is its nature, it sees always before it an empty space in which it cannot find a footing however much it flounders. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and terrible, unendurable.

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I must know…What matters is to find a purpose…to find a truth that is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die…This is what my soul thirsts for as the African desert thirsts for water.

For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The

However, a self, every instant it exists, is in process of becoming, for the self [potentially] does not actually exist, it is only that which it is to become. In so far as the self does not become itself, it is not its own self; but not to be one's own self is despair.

The way of objective reflection turns the individual into something accidental, and thus turns existence into an indifferent, vanishing something.

for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God. Upon

Truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but a life.

for the paradox is that he as the individual puts himself in an absolute relation to the absolute.

Nobody knows more of the truth than what he is of the truth. To properly know the truth is to be in the truth; it is to have the truth for one's life. This always costs a struggle. Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification. In short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life.

Ein Spießbürger ist, wer ein absolutes Verhältnis zu relativen Dingen hat.

Fortvivlelsens Misforhold er ikke et simpelt Misforhold, men et Misforhold i et Forhold, der forholder sig til sig selv, og er sat af et Andet, saa Misforholdet i hiint for sig værende Forhold tillige reflekterer sig uendeligt i Forholdet til den Magt, som satte det.

Behind the world we live in, in the distant background, lies another world standing in roughly the same relation to the former as the stage one sometimes sees in the theatre behind the real stage stands to the latter.

Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds. Hvilken Sætning, jo meer den gjennemtænkes, netop ender med, at Livet i Timeligheden aldrig ret bliver forstaaeligt, netop fordi jeg intet Øieblik kan faae fuldelig Ro til at indtage Stillingen: baglænds.