Quotes About Existence

Modern pessimism is an expression of the uselessness of the modern world — not of the world and of existence.

To estimate what a type of man is worth, one must calculate the price paid for his preservation — one must know the conditions of his existence.

A nihilist is a man who judges that the real world ought not to be, and that the world as it ought to be does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: this 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos—an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.

Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it--the only satisfactory theodicy!

There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you know there are no purposes, you also know there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word 'accident' have a meaning.

In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.

There is no eternal justice.

What matters is not eternal life, but eternal vivacity.

The seventh way to be noble: always being disguised, for the higher the type, the more a man requires an incognito. If God existed, he would be obliged to show himself to the world only as a man.

The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.

Nu viaÅ£a veÅŸnic? e important?, ci veÅŸnica însufleÅ£ire.

Why should one live? All is vain! To live- that is to thresh straw; to live- that is to burn oneself and yet not get warm.-

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of Being. Everything dies, everything blooms again; eternally runs the year of Being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally is built the same house of Being. Everything separates, everything greets itself again; eternally true to itself remains the ring of Being.

Since humanity came into being, man hath enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brethren, is our original sin.

Life is a dark chain of events.

Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

dead through immortality.' We

What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself (– the nonsensical idea here last rejected was propounded, as 'intelligible freedom', by Kant, and perhaps also by Plato before him). No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives.

What do you believe in? — In this: that the weight of all things must be determined anew

Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!

The human being first put values into things, in order to preserve itself—it created a meaning for things, a human's meaning! Therefore it calls itself 'human'—that is: the evaluator.

He who does not find greatness in God finds it nowhere. He must either deny it or create it.

To judge the value of life by whether we find it now unpleasant or not — can a more wild, extravagant vanity be imagined?

We are primordially illogical and hence unjust beings and can recognise this fact: this is one of the greatest and most baffling discords of existence.