Quotes About Existence

Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.

Not to be born surpasses thought and speech. The second best is to have seen the light and then go back quickly whence we came

We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man

For now I feel All we who live are but an empty show And idle pageant of a shadowy dream.

You are nothing at all. Just a crack where the light slipped through.

Never to have been born is best. Everyone knows that, and a close second, once you have appeared in this life, is a quick return, as soon as you can, to where you came from.

Tis better not to be than to vilely live. Greedy of gain is every barbarous tribe.

they] reason'd high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost. (Paradise Lost 2.658

To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.

O the generations of men92 the dying generations—adding the total of all your lives I find they come to nothing

Live, Oedipus, as if there's no tomorrow!

To never have been born would be the greatests boon of all !

O the generations of men the dying generations—adding the total of all your lives I find they come to nothing

does there exist, is there a man on earth who seizes more joy than just a dream, a vision?

I tell you the truth, you gave me life my breath leapt up in you and now you bring down night upon my eyes.

So, when I am nothing—then am I a man?

Niet om te haten, maar om lief te hebben ben ik op de wereld gekomen.

Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay. To trace the backward way.

Vossa existência, frágeis mortais, é aos meus olhos menos que nada. Felicidade só conheceis imaginada; vossa ilusão logo é seguida pela desdita.

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.