Quotes About Existence

And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people's prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.

Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you're alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?

Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Stevie Smith calling Death the only god who must come when he's called tickled you pink, as did the various ways people have said that were it not for suicide they could not go on.

Nabokov's syllogism. Other men die; but I am not another; therefore I'll not die.

He was saying that perhaps it was a mistake to bring human beings into a world that had such a strong possibility of becoming, in their lifetimes, a bleak and terrifying if not wholly unlivable place.

I had discovered the miraculous possibility that art holds out to us: to be a part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time.

In her soul, sin continued to exist, like roots of a weed intertwined in the soil. It no longer blossomed or flared up or smelled fragrant, but it was still there in the soil.

God is in everything and everybody.

Some nights he thinks they are just a dream God is having

What do we mean when we ask what the point is? Reflection bakes no bread, but then neither does architecture, music, art, history, or literature.

God's incomprehensibility cannot be superseded. Human existence, therefore, could be described as grounded in the abyss of mystery, and human relationship with God could be characterized as openness to mystery.

I have argued that philosophy doesn't begin in wonder or in the fact that things are, it begins in a realization that things are not what they might be. It begins with a sense of a lack, of something missing, and that provokes a series of questions.

Yesterday is History, Tomorrow a Mistery. Today is a gift, that's why they call it the present.

Moments recalled like friends. It was that way or another. We're fairly certain either way. Stories. They are with us. Time doesn't forsake. It doesn't soothe or decrease. Never.

Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.

God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words.

It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man which repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man. so when one begins to doubt one begins to cease to believe in a world order in which God has a different place. One really begins to think that God is on leave.

Such a series of hammer blows! Mankind, it seemed, was now suddenly really rather—dare one say it?—insignificant. He may not after all have been, as he had eternally supposed, specially created. The Book of Genesis, believed by so many to be Holy Writ, was perhaps no more than the stuff of myth and ancient legend. And now even the continents themselves, long supposed to be the most reliable and unshifting bedrock of our very existence, had become mobile.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.