Quotes About Existence

She realized that the world was a dance of a million fates. In this dance she was but a single soul.

Was it not Jean-Paul Sartre who said, 'Man is condemned to be free! Because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does!

Then you'll remember the motto of John Carter of Mars: 'I still live.' Those three simple words express the essence of man, don't you think? With those three words, Burroughs expressed the human condition, because as long as life exists—there is hope.

When one dies, the energy that is the life force within them does not cease to exist. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but only changed from one state to another. While we live, that energy is the power source of the body; at death, it is released and becomes the disembodied soul of who we were.

my grandfather is right, then death is only going to be a doorway from this world into Heaven. And if he's wrong, then it's simply going to be the end of my consciousness. I won't feel anything, I won't know that I'm dead, I will just come to an end.

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.

We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.' We had all simultaneously realised that our home was not limitless – there was an edge to our existence.

Depression is not a state of mind but a state of being.

The only way to exact meaning from an otherwise futile existence is to connect yourself by faith to God.

We cannot live without memories, but we cannot live within them either.

Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive.

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

As we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born – and particularly bad luck it is.

Never to have been born is best But if we must see the light, the next best Is quickly returning whence we came. When youth departs, with all its follies, Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them? Sophocles' Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, The best would be never to have been born at all. Heinrich Heine2

We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.

On my view there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.

Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentuous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

Perhaps we would not be human if the quality of our lives were much better than it is. It does not follow that the quality of human life is good.

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place

Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child's sake. That much should be apparent to everybody, even those who reject the stronger view for which I argue in this book-that not only does one not benefit people by bringing them into existence, but one always harms them.

There's such a thing as chronic pain, but there's no such thing as chronic pleasure. ... For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good. But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn't be bad, because there'd be nobody to be deprived of those good things.

It is good that existers enjoy their pleasures. It is also good that pains are avoided through non-existence. However, that is only part of the picture. Because there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, but there is something bad about coming into existence, it seems that all things considered non-existence is preferable.

We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die—obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space.