Quotes About Existence

Sometimes I feel like I'm a pair of eyes and ears, and I'm just trying to stay safe and make sense of what's happening. I don't want pain. I don't want to die. I don't want to see other people around me die. But I don't have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.

Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot and he creates Gods by the dozen. —Michel de Montaigne, Essais

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people's.

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, & you believe you are living.

There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.

I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.

Hell is a different place for each man, or each man has his own particular hell. My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational level of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose, where one lives by pure impulse, pure fantasy, and therefore pure madness. No, that is not the inferno.

Pure love, pure friendship—these are ideals. These may exist now and then, and they are beautiful things to behold. But they are not goals. They are phenomenal and accidental.

The river of life divides into two branches: being and formulating.

Awareness hurts. Relationships hurts. Life hurts. But to float, to drift, to live in the dream does not hurt.

Malraux says art is our rebellion against man's fate. La condition humaine is what I have never accepted. That is why I tried to create my own world.

I think sometimes that I must live a great part of my life in a trance, or in some sort of anesthetic state.

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence. Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams, and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.

I fly, I crawl, I weep, I laugh, I swim, I grow, I fall, I need, I want, I follow, I break, I sink, I love, I exist.

She is so busy just BEING, talking, walking, making love, drinking, that she can achieve nothing else.

There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time.

I share with Henry an anger not at the imperfection of women, but at the foulness of living itself.

I find that I do not know what to believe, that I have not decided yet whether analysis simplifies and undramatizes our existence, or whether it is the most subtle, the most insidious, the most magnificent way of making dramas more terrible, more maddening.

The day we cease to take nourishment from the underground rivers of the psyche, we feel life is empty. We only become aware of alienation when neurosis sets in as the symptom of its existence.

You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.