existence

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
f9ab1a7	I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.	existence	Sylvia Plath
43fc57d	To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd!	existence life	William Shakespeare
0517f8b	Of course I'll hurt you. Of course you'll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.	existence risk fear love hurt	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
fadd42b	It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world...by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.	existence	Ken Kesey
7b00376	"La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas." ( )"	existence reality ruse ruses sleight-of-hand tricks devil	Charles Baudelaire
4bf76d2	I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.	existence	Salman Rushdie
36ab0de	Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.	existence western knowledge horror	Cormac McCarthy
f73daac	It is good to be a cynic -- it is better to be a contented cat -- and it is best not to exist at all.	suicide existence cynic	H.P. Lovecraft
0ab6b31	About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough--and even miraculous enough if you insist--I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others--while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity--so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities... but there, there. Enough.	existence morality faith religion god life secular-ethics supernaturalism meaning-of-life debate existentialism ethics materialism naturalism atheism respect self-respect	Christopher Hitchens
1542bd3	Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.	existence barriers boundaries questions children	Milan Kundera
e8aea28	You are afraid to die, and you're afraid to live. What a way to exist.	live existence	Neale Donald Walsch
58ae38f	Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.	existence science philosophy empirical knowledge	Arthur Schopenhauer
f51672f	Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.	existence problem humor no-remorse invention voltaire atheist inventions	Christopher Hitchens
9c92375	You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no . . . anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You'll just -- exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever . . . lost.	existence dementors-kiss remus-lupin empty soul	J.K. Rowling
dc74dad	I don't want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I'll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it's possible to be. I'm growing and I don't know how to grow. I'm living but I haven't started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it's like I'm not here in the world at all and I simply don't exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.	existence life growing-up	David Almond
5f9383d	REMEMBER YOUR GREATNES	existence giant living-achievement loss struggles suffering suzy-kassem poem courage poetry human achieve beauty confidence strength success life wisdom inspirational winners born great affirmation eye loser egg sperm winner big attitude survivor winning obstacles small competition odds greatness successful birth pains race warrior victory losing fears win	Suzy Kassem
30f8134	"Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled."	existence knowledge	Albert Camus
d6ba4d6	If life -- the craving for which is the very essence of our being -- were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.	existence life value	Arthur Schopenhauer
13cdaad	The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.	man existence light death darkness life cradle common-sense calm afterlife eternity life-after-death	Vladimir Nabokov
bfbbc70	What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.	mankind existence humanity self-awareness essence self-definition classic-quotes	Jean-Paul Sartre
3661421	When I took the pills, I wanted to kill someone I hated. I didn't know that other Veronikas existed inside me, Veronikas that I could love.	existence hate love menthal pill suicidal other decide hospital kill die insane	Paulo Coelho
1e57939	I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.	existence science cosmos cosmology informed knowledge	Carl Sagan
3c4cc99	From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.	pain existence life coexist find-a-way haruki-murakam the-wind-up-bird-chronicle murakami intense center japanese painful japan exist purpose	Haruki Murakami
166fa6d	I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.	existence life finality definition	Jean-Paul Sartre
c684b82	Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.	existence loss self	Nicole Krauss
d1cb083	Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.	evolution existence natural-selection	Richard Dawkins
d977f82	The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.	existence youth selling-out maturity existentialism	Paul Murray
1822024	The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.	time existence world	Henry Miller
1ac29f7	And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks	universe existence life fairness	Tom Robbins
bb2c587	"Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form."	illness pain existence depression incomprehensible gloom elusive mood self intellect	William Styron
496a244	What keeps all living things busy and in motion is the striving to exist. But when existence is secured, they do not know what to do: that is why the second thing that sets them in motion is a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, not to feel it any longer, 'to kill time', i.e. to escape boredom.	existence	Arthur Schopenhauer
e83aa57	The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy.	tragedy loneliness existence roth	Philip Roth
3239f57	Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....	man existence humanism consistency essence atheistic views definition beliefs sartre jean-paul-sartre existentialism atheist humans	Jean-Paul Sartre
f250e4c	"Why are you looking at me like that?" Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."	existence john-green tfios the-fault-in-our-stars enjoy pleasures beautiful	John Green
36c3d2b	Ich werde stehen und warten. Ich werde mude werden. Ich werde nicht einschlafen. Ich werde sterben.	sleep existence waiting	Hermann Hesse
96834cb	God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science - an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.	evolution existence science god god-of-gaps lennox scientific intellectual explanation dawkins	John Lennox
82f7d32	I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.	existence	Jhumpa Lahiri
068e1dd	"The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own "existence" and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger."	existence history symbology unconscious	C.G. Jung
94a7a16	I don't know what understanding myself is. I don't look inside. I don't believe I exist behind myself.	understanding seeing personality existence nature reality personae pantheism feeling clarity meaning-of-life paganism self	Alberto Caeiro
deffa70	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.	existence life tropics west-indies summer modernity	Herman Wouk
af0a059	"Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full."	understanding existence self-actualization purpose self	James McBride
07e977a	"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."	existence maturity dread	Colson Whitehead
e102636	ykh mwjwd agh bh wjwd bdy, chh my khwhd - jz pyn yn bdyt?	existence	Isaac Asimov
4a4c65a	Everything's different from us. That's why everything exists.	universe seeing existence meaning reality god life love truth pantheism clarity paganism being	Alberto Caeiro
cfe0237	Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.	existence science philosophy non-existence	Stanisław Lem
737abe9	Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book or How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians or Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest or Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life	existence self self-help	Walker Percy
44ab4f5	I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgements must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.	existence death	Leo Tolstoy
9397687	I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.	existence friends life life-roles existentialism	Stephen Chbosky
2d56167	El misterio de la vida no es problema que hay que resolver, sino una realidad que hay que experimentar.	existence reality life existencial dune science-fiction realidad vida	Frank Herbert
e658818	What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins	existence courage life narrow-mindedness open-mindedness perspective growth society	Alice Walker
a514c2b	Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.	virtue man mind existence morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think consciousness thinking morals values	Ayn Rand
9e860d9	"I murmur: "It's a seat," a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated--bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the water, floating with the current, belly in the air in a great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey's belly, my feet dangling in the clear water."	existence seat	Jean-Paul Sartre
075ec28	"Let me sleep," he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror - this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man's door in her face. Instantly, she raised her hand to knock, discovered the rock... she banged on the door with the rock, but not loudly, just enough to let him know how desperate she was to get back in, but not enough to bother him if he didn't want to answer. He didn't. No sound, no movement of the door. Nothing but the void. "Tony?" she gasped, pressing her ear to the door. Silence. "Okay," she said numbly; clutching her rock she walked unsteadily across the porch toward her own living quarters. The rock vanished. Her hand felt nothing. "Damn," she said, not knowing how to react. Where had it gone? Into air. But then it must have been an illusion, she realized. He put me in a hypnotic state and made me believe. I should have known it wasn't really true. A million stars burst into wheels of light, blistering, cold light, that drenched her. It came from behind and she felt the great weight of it crash into her. "Tony," she said, and fell into the waiting void. She thought nothing; she felt nothing. She saw only, saw the void as it absorbed her, waiting below and beneath her as she plummeted down the many miles. On her hands and knees she died. Alone on the porch. Still clutching for what did not exist."	maze-of-death philip-k-dick existence nothing nothingness void	Philip K. Dick
40652e5	...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.	existence oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit to-create jeanette-winterson creation	Jeanette Winterson
a7247cb	Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.	existence life	G.K. Chesterton
1b6f681	He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.	existence mortality non-existence non-fiction essay impermanence oblivion	Milan Kundera
5a977fa	Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.	existence inevitable-progress inverse-tower-of-babel	Don DeLillo
0b6e481	Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.	existence truth immersion morocco senses objectivity subjectivity outsider stranger	Paul Bowles
0393383	How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?	existence	J. Courtney Sullivan
9bc9c26	Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.	existence passion life condition misleading	Julian Barnes
7a00bf5	He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.	existence life growing-up	Jack Kerouac
442ec4b	For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want - but an end?	existence life	Isaac Asimov
bfa9905	it was not a curse upon mankind, but the balm which reconciled it to existence.	existence brow daily-bread sweat curse	W. Somerset Maugham
1fc7021	Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them.	existence death	Philip C. Plait
21f9722	Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.	solitude existence meaning ennui postwar meaninglessness modernism subjectivity isolation	Paul Bowles
9da2d31	As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a cell? Yet it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be.	existence history life desires impulse humans	Bill Bryson
5bc7d3d	What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.	hopelessness time existence futility apathy existentialism hopeless habit	Michel Faber
5e0d471	"Leonardo believed his research had the potential to convert millions to a more spiritual life. Last year he categorically proved the existence of an energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all physically connected... that the molecules in your body are intertwined with the molecules in mine... that there is a single force moving within all of us." Langdon felt disconcerted. And the power of God shall unite us all. "Mr. Vetra actually found a way to demonstrate that particles are connected?" "Conclusive evidence. A recent Scientific American article hailed New Physics as a surer path to God than religion itself."	existence spirituality religion science spiritual categorically connected energy-force within molecules scientific physical particles energy exist evidence physics	Dan Brown
109c187	One of the misconceptions about atheism is that it somehow means someone denies the possibility of a deity. In all actuality, it simply means you don't believe it to be the case -- a point that should not be hard to understand with the complete lack of physical evidence that points to the existence of such a being or beings. Even if you're 51 percent sure that there is no magical man in the sky, you are an atheist; and admitting that is the first half of the battle.	myth existence god possible atheist	David G. McAfee
1fd1fb1	The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the courage to be; if we we make mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have made all the difference. If we are, we will make terrible errors. But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting in our own points of reference to show us the way.	existence courage challenges speaking teachers mistakes teaching	Madeleine L'Engle
090584d	There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.	sleep existence life	José Saramago
c54d884	Consciousness determines existence.	existence reality	Michio Kaku
463ed64	But if I make an observation, what is to determine which state I am in? This means that someone else has to observe me to collapse my wave function.	existence reality wave-function	Michio Kaku
1828968	"Do you believe in hell, Justina?" "Yes, Susana. And in heaven, too." "I only believe in hell, " said Susana."	existence torment sin	Juan Rulfo
f927859	I'm not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I'm telling you because I know.	existence life significance middle-age insignificance	Jeanette Winterson
c30de86	In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.	human-rights existence self-preservation	Wole Soyinka
ca53b74	The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. .A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, 'Suicide is selfishness.' Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it--suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness.	suicide existence cowardice selfishness	David Mitchell
a184cec	Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.	existence meaning life truth meaning-of-life	Ricardo Piglia
73f4be2	There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable.	existence death life creativity	Jeanette Winterson
b582494	Werner likes to crouch in his dormer and imagine radio waves like mile-long harp strings,bending and vibrating over Zollverein,flying through forests,through cities,through walls.At midnight he and Jutta prowl the ionosphere,searching for that lavish,penetrating voice.When they find it,Werner feels as if he has been launched into a different existence,a secret place where great discoveries are possible,where an orphan from a coal town can solve some vital mystery hidden in the physical world.	existence orphan	Anthony Doerr
7b93544	One could say that the mechanism of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion. I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves.	existence music life transformation	Jhumpa Lahiri
f1f15d6	Why, Mr. Anderson?, Why, why?. Why do you do it? Why, why get up?. Why keep fighting?. Do you believe you're fighting...for something?. For more than your survival?. Can you tell me what it is?. Do you even know?; Is it freedom?, Or truth?. Perhaps peace?. Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now, You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson?. Why?, Why do you persist?. Agent Smith ( Matrix Revolutions Movie, 2003 ).	existence passion freedom persistence love truth why-we-live illusions matrix why perception human-beings survival survival-instinct win fight	William Irwin
b898f2f	The air is so dry, so clear, and there's so few people, almost no lights. And you can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like you're lying on a giant spinning ball in space.	stars existence wonder life stargazing the-milky-way the-world space existentialism	Mohsin Hamid
03579be	El pintor queria retratar las heridas invisibles de la existencia	existence life pintor	Manuel Rivas

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath

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To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd!

existence life

William Shakespeare

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Of course I'll hurt you. Of course you'll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.

existence risk fear love hurt

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world...by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

existence

Ken Kesey

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"La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas." ( )"

existence reality ruse ruses sleight-of-hand tricks devil

Charles Baudelaire

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I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

existence

Salman Rushdie

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Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

existence western knowledge horror

Cormac McCarthy

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It is good to be a cynic -- it is better to be a contented cat -- and it is best not to exist at all.

suicide existence cynic

H.P. Lovecraft

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About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough--and even miraculous enough if you insist--I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others--while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity--so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities... but there, there. Enough.

existence morality faith religion god life secular-ethics supernaturalism meaning-of-life debate existentialism ethics materialism naturalism atheism respect self-respect

Christopher Hitchens

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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

existence barriers boundaries questions children

Milan Kundera

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You are afraid to die, and you're afraid to live. What a way to exist.

live existence

Neale Donald Walsch

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Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

existence science philosophy empirical knowledge

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

existence problem humor no-remorse invention voltaire atheist inventions

Christopher Hitchens

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You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no . . . anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You'll just -- exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever . . . lost.

existence dementors-kiss remus-lupin empty soul

J.K. Rowling

dc74dad

I don't want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I'll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it's possible to be. I'm growing and I don't know how to grow. I'm living but I haven't started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it's like I'm not here in the world at all and I simply don't exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.

existence life growing-up

David Almond

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REMEMBER YOUR GREATNES

existence giant living-achievement loss struggles suffering suzy-kassem poem courage poetry human achieve beauty confidence strength success life wisdom inspirational winners born great affirmation eye loser egg sperm winner big attitude survivor winning obstacles small competition odds greatness successful birth pains race warrior victory losing fears win

Suzy Kassem

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"Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled."

existence knowledge

Albert Camus

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If life -- the craving for which is the very essence of our being -- were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.

existence life value

Arthur Schopenhauer

13cdaad

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

man existence light death darkness life cradle common-sense calm afterlife eternity life-after-death

Vladimir Nabokov

bfbbc70

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.

mankind existence humanity self-awareness essence self-definition classic-quotes

Jean-Paul Sartre

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When I took the pills, I wanted to kill someone I hated. I didn't know that other Veronikas existed inside me, Veronikas that I could love.

existence hate love menthal pill suicidal other decide hospital kill die insane

Paulo Coelho

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I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

existence science cosmos cosmology informed knowledge

Carl Sagan

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From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

pain existence life coexist find-a-way haruki-murakam the-wind-up-bird-chronicle murakami intense center japanese painful japan exist purpose

Haruki Murakami

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I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

existence life finality definition

Jean-Paul Sartre

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Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.

existence loss self

Nicole Krauss

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Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

evolution existence natural-selection

Richard Dawkins

d977f82

The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.

existence youth selling-out maturity existentialism

Paul Murray

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The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.

time existence world

Henry Miller

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And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks

universe existence life fairness

Tom Robbins

bb2c587

"Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form."

illness pain existence depression incomprehensible gloom elusive mood self intellect

William Styron

496a244

What keeps all living things busy and in motion is the striving to exist. But when existence is secured, they do not know what to do: that is why the second thing that sets them in motion is a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, not to feel it any longer, 'to kill time', i.e. to escape boredom.

existence

Arthur Schopenhauer

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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy.

tragedy loneliness existence roth

Philip Roth

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Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....

man existence humanism consistency essence atheistic views definition beliefs sartre jean-paul-sartre existentialism atheist humans

Jean-Paul Sartre

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"Why are you looking at me like that?" Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."

existence john-green tfios the-fault-in-our-stars enjoy pleasures beautiful

John Green

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Ich werde stehen und warten. Ich werde mude werden. Ich werde nicht einschlafen. Ich werde sterben.

sleep existence waiting

Hermann Hesse

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God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science - an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.

evolution existence science god god-of-gaps lennox scientific intellectual explanation dawkins

John Lennox

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I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.

existence

Jhumpa Lahiri

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"The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own "existence" and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger."

existence history symbology unconscious

C.G. Jung

94a7a16

I don't know what understanding myself is. I don't look inside. I don't believe I exist behind myself.

understanding seeing personality existence nature reality personae pantheism feeling clarity meaning-of-life paganism self

Alberto Caeiro

deffa70

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.

existence life tropics west-indies summer modernity

Herman Wouk

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"Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full."

understanding existence self-actualization purpose self

James McBride

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"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."

existence maturity dread

Colson Whitehead

e102636

ykh mwjwd agh bh wjwd bdy, chh my khwhd - jz pyn yn bdyt?

existence

Isaac Asimov

4a4c65a

Everything's different from us. That's why everything exists.

universe seeing existence meaning reality god life love truth pantheism clarity paganism being

Alberto Caeiro

cfe0237

Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.

existence science philosophy non-existence

Stanisław Lem

737abe9

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book or How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians or Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest or Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life

existence self self-help

Walker Percy

44ab4f5

I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgements must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.

existence death

Leo Tolstoy

9397687

I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.

existence friends life life-roles existentialism

Stephen Chbosky

2d56167

El misterio de la vida no es problema que hay que resolver, sino una realidad que hay que experimentar.

existence reality life existencial dune science-fiction realidad vida

Frank Herbert

e658818

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

existence courage life narrow-mindedness open-mindedness perspective growth society

Alice Walker

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Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

virtue man mind existence morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think consciousness thinking morals values

Ayn Rand

9e860d9

"I murmur: "It's a seat," a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated--bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the water, floating with the current, belly in the air in a great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey's belly, my feet dangling in the clear water."

existence seat

Jean-Paul Sartre

075ec28

"Let me sleep," he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror - this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man's door in her face. Instantly, she raised her hand to knock, discovered the rock... she banged on the door with the rock, but not loudly, just enough to let him know how desperate she was to get back in, but not enough to bother him if he didn't want to answer. He didn't. No sound, no movement of the door. Nothing but the void. "Tony?" she gasped, pressing her ear to the door. Silence. "Okay," she said numbly; clutching her rock she walked unsteadily across the porch toward her own living quarters. The rock vanished. Her hand felt nothing. "Damn," she said, not knowing how to react. Where had it gone? Into air. But then it must have been an illusion, she realized. He put me in a hypnotic state and made me believe. I should have known it wasn't really true. A million stars burst into wheels of light, blistering, cold light, that drenched her. It came from behind and she felt the great weight of it crash into her. "Tony," she said, and fell into the waiting void. She thought nothing; she felt nothing. She saw only, saw the void as it absorbed her, waiting below and beneath her as she plummeted down the many miles. On her hands and knees she died. Alone on the porch. Still clutching for what did not exist."

maze-of-death philip-k-dick existence nothing nothingness void

Philip K. Dick

40652e5

...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

existence oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit to-create jeanette-winterson creation

Jeanette Winterson

a7247cb

Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.

existence life

G.K. Chesterton

1b6f681

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.

existence mortality non-existence non-fiction essay impermanence oblivion

Milan Kundera

5a977fa

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

existence inevitable-progress inverse-tower-of-babel

Don DeLillo

0b6e481

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.

existence truth immersion morocco senses objectivity subjectivity outsider stranger

Paul Bowles

0393383

How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?

existence

J. Courtney Sullivan

9bc9c26

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.

existence passion life condition misleading

Julian Barnes

7a00bf5

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

existence life growing-up

Jack Kerouac

442ec4b

For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want - but an end?

existence life

Isaac Asimov

bfa9905

it was not a curse upon mankind, but the balm which reconciled it to existence.

existence brow daily-bread sweat curse

W. Somerset Maugham

1fc7021

Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them.

existence death

Philip C. Plait

21f9722

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.

solitude existence meaning ennui postwar meaninglessness modernism subjectivity isolation

Paul Bowles

9da2d31

As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a cell? Yet it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be.

existence history life desires impulse humans

Bill Bryson

5bc7d3d

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

hopelessness time existence futility apathy existentialism hopeless habit

Michel Faber

5e0d471

"Leonardo believed his research had the potential to convert millions to a more spiritual life. Last year he categorically proved the existence of an energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all physically connected... that the molecules in your body are intertwined with the molecules in mine... that there is a single force moving within all of us." Langdon felt disconcerted. And the power of God shall unite us all. "Mr. Vetra actually found a way to demonstrate that particles are connected?" "Conclusive evidence. A recent Scientific American article hailed New Physics as a surer path to God than religion itself."

existence spirituality religion science spiritual categorically connected energy-force within molecules scientific physical particles energy exist evidence physics

Dan Brown

109c187

One of the misconceptions about atheism is that it somehow means someone denies the possibility of a deity. In all actuality, it simply means you don't believe it to be the case -- a point that should not be hard to understand with the complete lack of physical evidence that points to the existence of such a being or beings. Even if you're 51 percent sure that there is no magical man in the sky, you are an atheist; and admitting that is the first half of the battle.

myth existence god possible atheist

David G. McAfee

1fd1fb1

The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the courage to be; if we we make mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have made all the difference. If we are, we will make terrible errors. But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting in our own points of reference to show us the way.

existence courage challenges speaking teachers mistakes teaching

Madeleine L'Engle

090584d

There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.

sleep existence life

José Saramago

c54d884

Consciousness determines existence.

existence reality

Michio Kaku

463ed64

But if I make an observation, what is to determine which state I am in? This means that someone else has to observe me to collapse my wave function.

existence reality wave-function

Michio Kaku

1828968

"Do you believe in hell, Justina?" "Yes, Susana. And in heaven, too." "I only believe in hell, " said Susana."

existence torment sin

Juan Rulfo

f927859

I'm not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I'm telling you because I know.

existence life significance middle-age insignificance

Jeanette Winterson

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In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.

human-rights existence self-preservation

Wole Soyinka

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The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. .A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, 'Suicide is selfishness.' Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it--suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness.

suicide existence cowardice selfishness

David Mitchell

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Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.

existence meaning life truth meaning-of-life

Ricardo Piglia

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There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable.

existence death life creativity

Jeanette Winterson

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Werner likes to crouch in his dormer and imagine radio waves like mile-long harp strings,bending and vibrating over Zollverein,flying through forests,through cities,through walls.At midnight he and Jutta prowl the ionosphere,searching for that lavish,penetrating voice.When they find it,Werner feels as if he has been launched into a different existence,a secret place where great discoveries are possible,where an orphan from a coal town can solve some vital mystery hidden in the physical world.

existence orphan

Anthony Doerr

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One could say that the mechanism of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion. I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves.

existence music life transformation

Jhumpa Lahiri

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Why, Mr. Anderson?, Why, why?. Why do you do it? Why, why get up?. Why keep fighting?. Do you believe you're fighting...for something?. For more than your survival?. Can you tell me what it is?. Do you even know?; Is it freedom?, Or truth?. Perhaps peace?. Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now, You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson?. Why?, Why do you persist?. Agent Smith ( Matrix Revolutions Movie, 2003 ).

existence passion freedom persistence love truth why-we-live illusions matrix why perception human-beings survival survival-instinct win fight

William Irwin

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The air is so dry, so clear, and there's so few people, almost no lights. And you can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like you're lying on a giant spinning ball in space.

stars existence wonder life stargazing the-milky-way the-world space existentialism

Mohsin Hamid

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El pintor queria retratar las heridas invisibles de la existencia

existence life pintor

Manuel Rivas