Quotes About Existence

When you abandon everything you can believe in, you're abandoning yourself. As if you've never existed. But that takes a long time. If you're no longer in control of your own life, can you at least be in control of its end?

To be here or somewhere else, to live or not to live, to look out through a broken window or not to look.

Everybody is guilty of mistakes and of serious mistakes, and the contemplation of these mistakes must darken, be it ever so little, the last years of existence.

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

The moment you're born you're done for.

We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.

humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.

If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.

Consciousness of self— the general realization that I exist independently of the circumstances of the moment—marks man's first great effort of abstraction; the detachment of the various spiritual activities from their function in the totality of his life and the unity of his world view is a second abstraction.

But it was not forgotten that an outside historical influence is never the ultimate reason for an intellectual revolution, for such an influence can become effective only if the preconditions fro its reception are already in existence.

My definition of living is to have excitement always; that's the difference between living and existing.

My vision of where I wanted to go in life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me.

Well, how do you understand things or people? It is a question Shreve himself asks, and then answers by referring precisely to Sutpen's opposite number, the little dream-woman Rosa Coldfield: "What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe

Sommige mensen lijden omdat ze niet hoeven te leven. Ze hebben alles. Hun natje, hun droogje, een dak boven het hoofd. Maar ze hoeven niet te leven, want ze hebben alles. Als ze een boek waren geweest, zou een recensent vast schrijven: 'Aardig, maar de noodzak ontbreekt'.

De bloem van de eeuwige jeugd', mompelt hij. Er dringen zich meer herinneringen aan hem op, ook aangename. In het moeras van zijn geheugen zitten ook mooie herinneringen verstopt. Als je je geluk kunt herinneren, dan heeft het bestaan.

I don't believe in omens or fear Forebodings. I flee from neither slander Nor from poison. Death does not exist. Everyone's immortal. Everything is too. No point in fearing death at seventeen, Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light; Neither death, nor darkness, exists. We're all already on the seashore; I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets When a shoal of immortality swims by. from "Life, Life

We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing. Our knowledge allows us to make use of all the forces already in existence, our art to interpret emotions already felt. One big war, an epidemic, and we collapse into ignorance and darkness, fit sons of chimpanzees.

Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.

If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?

From whatever point he starts, whatever path he follows, modern man comes to the same conclusion: behind its visible appearances, life hides a meaning that is eternally inaccessible to penetration by the spirit that seeks for its discovery, caught in the dilemma of being aware that it is impossible to find it, and yet also impossible to renounce the hopeless quest.

What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from - I cannot name it. But I am separated.

Alles was an Seele und Stoff im Universum vorhanden sein kann, findet sich in irgendeiner Form und irgendwie auch im menschlichen Körper. Wie sagt doch das schon erwähnte Vishvas?ra Tantra: »Was hier ist, ist auch dort. Was hier nicht ist, ist nirgends.«

Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.

The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years. Sooner or later we won't be able to tell the carrots from the onions.