Existence Quotes

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

~ Glenn Meade

The only time early bloomer has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.

~ Colson Whitehead

It is natural that people should differ most, and most violently, about the unknowable . . . There is all the room in the world for divergence of opinion about something that, so far as we can realistically perceive, does not exist.

~ E. Haldeman-Julius

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.

~ Herman Wouk

Remember all ye that existence is pure joy, that all the sorrows are but as shadows, they pass & are done, but there is that which remains.

~ Aleister Crowley

Happiness isn't something she spends much time thinking about. Survival, discomfort, hunger...these are the concerns that fill her days.

~ David Maine

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

~ Carl Sagan

It's idiotic, it's crazy. If you die and then you're just nothing, there isn't any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn't ready to be stopped. No one's ready to be stopped. We don't have *time* to be ready to be stopped. It's all crazy. . . . Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but *he* is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.

~ Nando Parrado

But “nowhere” does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot come closer from a definite direction within nearness, it is already “there” - and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and takes one’s breath - and yet it is nowhere.

~ Martin Heidegger

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.

~ Fernando Pessoa

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

~ Don Delillo

Just existing is where a lot of living happens.

~ Fred Gallagher

How did I make a living? I haven't. I have eked out an existence. - Ella Baker

~ Gail Collins

Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.

~ Adam-Troy Castro

Maps codify the miracle of existence.

~ Nicholas Crane

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.

~ Augustine Birrell

Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its 'universality' is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. *Being is a transcendens pure and simple*. And the transcendence of Dasein's Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical *individuation*. Every disclosure of Being as the *transcendens* is *transcendental* knowledge. *Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis*.Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of *existence*, has made fast the guide-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it *arises* and to which it *returns*.―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, p. 62

~ Martin Heidegger

If what you want does not exist, why not create it?

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

The Lord has made all things for Himself (Prov.xvi.4): apart from Himself there existed nothing to make them for. He made them for His own sake, for His own pleasure. But it was His pleasure to bring into existence things that could take pleasure in existence. For our sakes He made us for His sake. To us there is something mysterious in an altruism so total, but something exciting in the mystery. Among all the mysteries, many are greater, but it is hard to think of one more pleasing.

~ Frank Sheed

Actually there were only two forms of existence, I reflected: one that was tied to a place and one that wasn't. Both had always existed. Neither could be chosen.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

Consume life before it spoils.

~ Todd Crawshaw

In the vast spectrum of space-time’s coeternal continuum, I am but a glint of bundled energy held together by the translucent fiber of creative consciousness. The misty dew of private thoughts that inhabit my streaky underworld briefly forms a splintery part of the glittering arena of the cosmos. In the ether-like dawn of my awakening, my minuscule arch appears intravenously injected amid the dark matter of the nightscape. Reminiscent of the morning’s dew, my comet’s tailed reflection disintegrates and dissipates without a lasting trace in the dawn of a new age. I shall never wholly cease to exist, since my filtrate potentiality – a trace of my essence – remains suspended forevermore in celestial wonderment.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.

~ Virginia Woolf

being is one day and a million nights. the blood on the glass, blood lust with the sun holding. the universe beats for the lost and found. with you.

~ Gwen Calvo

The fish don't need to know why they're in the water.

~ Marty Rubin

The earth keeps turning but it never says why.

~ Marty Rubin

And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.

~ Anton Chekhov

It was if, in the process of its long and arduous journey from Afghanistan's mines to Europe's canvases, and its painful evolution from barren beginnings, ultramarine had collected and purified all the wisdom of the different worlds it traversed, retaining only what was common to then, and what was most important. This pure, clean color evokes undulating infinity, that delicate moment between day and night, an image of man constantly drifting between existence and non-existence.

~ Mileta Prodanović

I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have.

~ C.s. Lewis

Even more, in the created thing, is a perfection that she exists; since the greatest of all imperfections is, not to exist.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Seeing the skylines The heart becomes pensive and still; Mammoth is the world,Our existence…almost nil!

~ Neelam Saxena Chandra

Philosophic questions are attempts to understand the root nature of reality, existence, and knowledge.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Our obsession for success, recognition and supremacy in all circumstances without ever aware of the gravity of the situation and the subtle intricacies that impact the fabric of the society as a whole has made us more inhuman than humanly possible, as a result we have become more artificial, with not even an iota of LIFE throbbing within Us. Humanity as a whole has come to this juncture, wherein if we don't dare to accept and act on our vulnerabilities, our shortcomings in totality and to embrace failures in same breath as success as an integral part of life, then I fear we are creating a world of zombies!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

How much dust can a body make? Little specks of death. Measuring life in millimeters.

~ Ryan Galloway

To simply survive appears to be the choice of the plodding hoards that wander all around me. Therefore, I’ve adamantly committed to never hoard hoards.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Isn't Existence is the only thing that make us feel as ONE.

~ Pawan Parashar

They had nothing in common except for existing in the same time and space

~ Pascal Garnier

Lucifer endears himself to us only as the Lord of Lies, for in this role he is most convincing as a character, which is to say, as a fiction that has been so fully realized that he misguides us with a false feeling of our own reality because we are the ones who made him: he is subordinate to us, especially in the art of lying. For the acephalics among us who have said that the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world that he did not exist, it must be said back: if he did not exist, then neither would we.

~ Thomas Ligotti

I wasn't living, just existing.

~ Victoria Spry