Quotes About Existence

Everything that can be denied, deserves to be denied; and real sincerity means the belief in a state of things which cannot be denied, or in which there is no lie. The sincere man feels that his activity has a metaphysical meaning. It can only be explained by the laws of a different and a higher life; it is in the deepest sense an affirmation: even if everything that he does seem utterly opposed to the laws of our present life.

Read from a distant star the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps tempt one to conclude that the earth is the ascetic planet par excellence, a nook of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures who could not get rid of a deep displeasure with themselves, with the earth, with all life and who caused themselves as much pain as possible out of pleasure in causing pain:?probably their only pleasure.

Dreams. ? We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way ? not at all or in an interesting manner.

If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.

Intoxicating joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, the world once seemed to me.

Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.

Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction.

I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break from me

The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.

Each individual represents the whole course of Evolution and he is not, as morals teach, something that begins at his birth.

Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I call dionysian

It is not true that the unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being (animal, man, mankind, etc) is its 'highest happiness': the case, on the contrary, is that every stage of evolution possesses a special and incomparable happiness neither higher nor lower but simply its own. Evolution does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else.

What does Nihilism mean?—That the highest values are losing their value.

The good life is that which succeeds in existing for the moment, without reference to past or future, without condemnation or selection, in a state of absolute lightness, and in the finished conviction that there is no difference therefore between the instant and eternity.

You have been a poor observer of life if you have not also seen the hand that, ever so gently – kills.

In fact, however, Nietzsche's very first book, The Birth, constitutes a declaration of independence from Schopenhauer: while Nietzsche admires him for honestly facing up to the terrors of existence, Nietzsche himself celebrates Greek tragedy as a superior alternative to Schopenhauer's "Buddhistic negation of the will." From tragedy Nietzsche learns that one can affirm life as sublime, beautiful, and joyous in spite of all suffering and cruelty.

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far — and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!

the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the beyond"—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether.

But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.