Quotes About Existence

Once you are born in this world you're old enough to die.

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.

What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?

In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.

Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal... Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.

Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off

The misfortune of our time is just this, that it has become simply nothing else but 'time', the temporal, which is impatient of hearing anything about eternity.

Even though it be true that the conception of God is absolute help, it is also the only help which is absolutely capable of revealing to man his own helplessness.

Spiritually, a man's thoughts must be the building in which he lives, otherwise it's wrong.

If the generations of man passed through the world like a ship passing through the sea and the wind over the desert—a fruitless and a vain thing; if eternal oblivion were ever greedily watching for its prey and there existed no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches—how empty were life then, and how dismal!

Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being, whatever his age may be.

He who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety. Since he is both beast and angel, he can be in anxiety, and the greater the anxiety, the greater the man.

That in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.

God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.

Deepest within every person there is nonetheless an anxiety about being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household.

The good is by virtue my willing it. Otherwise it has no existence.

Det gäller att finna en sanning, som är sanning för mig, att finna en idé för vilken jag vill leva och dö.

Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith; for only in infinite resignation does my eternal validity become transparent to me, and only then can there be talk of grasping existence on the strength of faith.

How empty life is and without meaning. - We bury a man, we follow him to the grave, we throw three spades of earth on him, we ride out in a coach, we ride home in a coach, we take comfort in the thought that a long life awaits us. But how long is threescore years and ten? Why not finish it at once?

Never let the meaning of your love light escape to the dark nothingness of oblivion.

O Lord, I am further away from me than from You!