Quotes About Existence

Time is the only true purgatory.

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.

To be is to think and to be thinkable. To live is to continue thinking and to remember having done so.

The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

To live is like love, all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.

The major sin is the sin of being born.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

Each moment I felt increasing upon me that dreadful doubt as to my own identity—as to the continuity of my past and present existence—which is the first sign of that distraction which comes on those who have lost themselves in the bush. I had fought against this feeling hitherto, and had conquered it; but the intense silence and gloom of this rocky wilderness were too much for me, and I felt that my power of collecting myself was beginning to be impaired.

Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all, except in so far as thinking has made it so.

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?

When learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foesFirst rear'd the stage, immortal Shakespeare rose;Each change of many-color'd life he drew,Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new:Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.

Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour; Improve each moment as it flies! Life's a short summer, man a flower; He dies — alas! how soon he dies!

"Enlarge my life with multitude of days!"In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays:Hides from himself his state, and shuns to knowThat life protracted is protracted woe.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

was nothing known of Sumerian culture; the very existence of a Sumerian people and language was unsuspected. The scholars and archeologists who some hundred years ago began excavating in Mesopotamia were

The most significant myths of a given culture are usually the cosmogonic, or creation myths, the sacred stories evolved and developed in an effort to explain the origin of the universe, the presence of the gods, and the existence of man.

I was born," the Mouse said. "I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.

Health lies -- implicitly -- in merging with something (matter) rather than nothing (vacuum).

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.