Quotes About Existence

The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking the world was anything else.

Function? Why function? Who needs more functioning human beings? It's really quite astounding, if you ask me, the sheer quantity of normal in the world today. I think that's the real horror of modern life.

The acceptance of the gift of freedom transforms our perception of our social and political existence.

We hang here, inquisitive carbon-based life forms, knowing that every atom of carbon now in our bodies was once in the interior of a star.

Nothing is avowed to exist nowadays unless it can be bought or sold or measured by scientists. Why should artists have to acknowledge the complete supremacy of materialism? Must everything mysterious be exploded or all unaccountable things explained away? And if so, what is gained? Plain men drudging in a world of plain things. That's not the world I know and it's one I've no wish to know.

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.

It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.

What ages is not merely your functions and organs, but the whole of your nature, that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago.

The austere serenity of Shangri-La. Its forsaken courts and pale pavilions shimmered in repose from which all the fret of existence had ebbed away, leaving a hush as if moments hardly dared to pass.

Anno domini—that's the most fatal complaint of all in the end.

Death is only one way of dying; living partially, living fearfully, is our more common, daily collusion with death.

The truth is, all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity.

The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry [into the age of the earth] is, that we find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.

Nothing is True, All is Permitted

Fife... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

You speak of Sorcery. It so happens that in the investigations leading first to my Conjectures concerning Light and later to my System of the World, I fell upon a pretty Proof that Wicked Spirits enjoy no essential Existence, being but Desires of the Mind.

1270We are all composed of stardust or, if you're feeling a tad more cynical, solar excrement.

I have no past--the steps have disappeared the wind has blown them away.

No eres mas que una chispa en el momento del tiempo situado entre dos eternidades, el pasado y el futuro

As Nietzsche said: 'He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

The greatest lie the devil ever told is that he doesn't exist. Those