Quotes About Existence

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.

The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.

If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.

Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish tother from which.

How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones?

from the middle-middle classes, whose highest desire seemed shelter – continuous shelter – not a lair in the darkness to be reached against fear, but shelter everywhere and always, until the existence of earth and sky is forgotten, shelter from poverty and disease and violence and impoliteness; and consequently from joy; God slipped this retribution in.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.

Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Nothing's the same for anyone. That's why life's this Hell, if you do a thing you're damned, and if you don't you're damned—

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed. I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view...

Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am I.

Quizás nadie quisiese tal amor, pero podía ya no sentirse avergonzado de él, porque aquel amor era "él", no el cuerpo o el alma, no alma y cuerpo, sino "él" viviendo en ambos.

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness.

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it—and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil.

Life is a mysterious business.

The real thing's money and all the rest is a dream.

All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all.

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

und verstand nichts, nur dass der Mensch geschaffen worden ist, ohne Hilfe des Himmels Schmerzen und Einsamkeit zu erleiden.