Existence Life Quotes

1. "Book: Out of My Later Years Author: Einstein, Albert ======================================== *** Highlight 2014/1/30 Of what is significant in one's own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?"
Author: Albert Einstein

2. "This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader."
Author: Alberto Manguel

3. "There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being."
Author: Aleksandar Hemon

4. "She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movement under her eyelids, and the somnolent gestures of her hands and feet, it seems as if her dreams grow more urgent and intense, as if the life she lives in the closed world of dreams is now about to possess her utterly, as if her small, increasingly reluctant wakenings were an interpretation of some more vital existence, so she is loath to spend even those necessary moments of wakefulness with us, wakings strange as her sleepings. Her marvellous fate - a sleep more lifelike than the living, a dream which consumes the world."
Author: Angela Carter

5. "If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most Ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

6. "But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "Some people center the universe around themselves; while making other people nothing but decorations to their existence. "I will do this and then I will do that and then people will think this about me and then people will think that about me, and then I will add that person to my life when the convenient time arrives, and this person over here would make a very convenient addition as well..." They build their own thrones for themselves, and add decorations all around their thrones. The problem with that is: it does not bring happiness. A throne must be built for you; it must not be you who builds your own throne. If so, everything that you think you are is only an illusion! And illusions dissolve one day. Poof!"
Author: C. JoyBell C.

8. "Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life."
Author: Charlotte Bunch

9. "If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

10. "The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore."
Author: Cyril Connolly

11. "We can so easily deceive ourselves, mistaking the presence of physical bodies in a crowd for the existence of spiritual life in a community."
Author: David Platt

12. "No matter what advantages you are born with-- money, intelligence, an appealing personality, a sunny outlook, or good social connections-- none of these provides a magic key to an easy existence. Somehow life manages to bring difficult problems, the causes of untold suffering and struggle. How you meet your challenges makes all the difference between the promise of success and the specter of failure."
Author: Deepak Chopra

13. "Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town' nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me – and I'll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no "do-overs" to employ a favored phrase of Xandra's, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death."
Author: Donna Tartt

14. "Okay," I confessed. "You got me. I don't want to die. I'm terrified of death. I fear there's nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I'll ever possess. That's why I'm here."He patted my leg to give me reassurance. "That's why they're all here. Even the ones that believe in heaven and seventy-two virgins and every other good thing supposedly waiting for them in the afterlife."
Author: Drew Magary

15. "Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."
Author: Edward O. Wilson

16. "I have always clung, or maybe I wanted to cling, to bits and pieces of existence here and there, with no coherence, no center, no continuity in my life. There is a shorter way of saying this: I am a mess."
Author: Elif Shafak

17. "...He had seen that look in so many eyes lately, not the fear of death but the fear of life. Is it like this? Is it true that it's like this? Oh God, if it's like this what do we do? He had instantly pulled himself together to grapple with her fear."It's all right, Prunella," he had said a little wildly. "I tell you it's all right. Life's not this little bit of existence you're plodding through now, it's the whole thing, all that is. It's the breath of God, words that he spoke, a song, a stream of white light that goes back to him again. Life is good... Life is fine and grand, and we should love it to the depths of our souls."
Author: Elizabeth Goudge

18. "So, kid, you've got to live,and not just that stoic existence you've been stomping trough all this time.You've got to be kind,you've got to fall in love,fall out of love,no matter how much it hurtsbecause my god,it's worth it. Don't let the world turn you to stone;you've got to feel.And sometimes,your heart will threaten to march right out of your chest because you're so fucking full of it all-of the people, the places,the endless days,the eternal nights-and kid, that's fine.Be brave.Courage isn't measured by thenumber of people you've turned awayor by the counts of the nights you'vespent alone because you refuse to give someone the chance to love you. Being alone is not poetic;you've got to let them in.Let them peel back your skinand waltz into your bloodstreamand love them,love them,love them.And finally, kid,your life has already begun.Stop waiting.Chaos is already underway."
Author: Emily Palermo

19. "I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; - I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me."
Author: Erich Maria Remarque

20. "Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it."
Author: Eugène Ionesco

21. "We breathe in as existence, and breathe out as life. It is the heartbeat of the eternal moment."
Author: Franklin Gillette

22. "However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do."
Author: Frederick William Robertson

23. "The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."
Author: Georg Simmel

24. "The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole."
Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

25. "There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear."
Author: George Eliot

26. "Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on aglobe isolated in celestial space, from night to day and from one countryto another—human life cannot in any way be limited to the closedsystems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travailof recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could beexpressed by stating that life starts with the deficit of these systems;at least what it allows in the way of order and reserve has meaningonly from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberateand lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to any thingone can account for. It is only by such insubordination—even if it isimpoverished—that the human race ceases to be isolated in the unconditionalsplendor of material things."
Author: Georges Bataille

27. "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."
Author: Herman Wouk

28. "They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement..."
Author: Iain M. Banks

29. "I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can't get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn't just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noise that made room for everyone, money or not."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

30. "Do observe what is actually taking place within yourself and outside yourself in the competitive culture in which you live with its desire for power, position, prestige, name, success and all the rest of it - observe the achievements of which you are so proud, this whole field you call living in which there is conflict in every form of relationship, breeding hatred, antagonism, brutality and endless wars. This field, this life, is all we know, and being unable to understand the enormous battle of existence we are naturally afraid of it and find escape from it in all sorts of subtle ways. And we are frightened also of the unknown - frightened of death, frightened of what lies beyond tomorrow. So we are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there isno hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theo- logical concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is."
Author: Jiddu Krishnamurti

31. "Hardship in our present life is an atonement for sins committed in our previous existence, or the education necessary to prepare for a higher place in the life to come. That is what your teachers have taught you, haven't they?"
Author: John Allyn

32. "[...] these questions gave way, in the course of time, to a different preoccupation, namely, a slow and growing awareness of familiarity with the landscape into which she was being carried. A familiarity based not on the sighting of particular landmarks, but on her feeling that the very contours of the hills and fields, and the very shapes and colours of the buildings, now appeared as surviving monuments to the existence of a much earlier self whom she had long forgotten. She knew, of course, that they could not bring that self back to life, perish the thought, but they reminded her of it in a way which she did not find disagreeable."
Author: Jonathan Coe

33. "An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."
Author: Jose Ortega Y Gasset

34. "Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life."
Author: Kakuzō Okakura

35. "Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an apalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle, - a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium. Edna vaguely wondered what she meant by "life's delirium." It had crossed her thought like some unsought, extraneous impression."
Author: Kate Chopin

36. "Why people travel far from home-far from where they started. There was, of course, the obvious reason:escape. Escape from the monotony of every day. SO many of us chasing what we wished our everyday existence could be instead. But there was a less obvious and perhaps more important reason. Somewhere, often right in the middle of a trip, you got to believe this was your everyday life. You got to believe you were never going home again."
Author: Laura Dave

37. "For a man who is in love with the existence, nothing is ordinary in life!"
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

38. "In American religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God's difference from us—in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence, and holiness. God is my buddy, my inmost experience, or the power source for my living my best life now."
Author: Michael S. Horton

39. "It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection."
Author: Mircea Eliade

40. "Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem, and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life."
Author: Nathaniel Branden

41. "We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.This is no defeatism...The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too...All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of...the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but...with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it."
Author: Norbert Wiener

42. "If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence — in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself."
Author: Osho

43. "Proclaiming the death of the Lord "until he comes" (1 Cor 11:26) entails that all who take part in the Eucharist be committed to changing their lives and making them in a certain way completely "Eucharistic". It is this fruit of a transfigured existence and a commitment to transforming the world in accordance with the Gospel which splendidly illustrates the eschatological tension inherent in the celebration of the Eucharist and in the Christian life as a whole: "Come, Lord Jesus!" (Rev 22:20)"
Author: Pope John Paul II

44. "Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

45. "Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

46. "There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
Author: Richard Dawkins

47. "To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us. Life is the gift each of us has been given. Each life is our own and no one else's. It is precious beyond all counting. It is the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is..... Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it."
Author: Terry Goodkind

48. "When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I immediately knew that I wanted to write horror stories. I had read Arthur Machen before I read Lovecraft, and I didn't have that reaction at all. It was what I sensed in Lovecraft's works and what I learned about his myth as the "recluse of Providence" that made me think, "That's for me!" I already had a grim view of existence, so there was no problem there. I was and am agoraphobic, so being reclusive was a snap. The only challenge was whether or not I could actually write horror stories. So I studied fiction writing and wrote every day for years and years until I started to get my stories accepted by small press magazines. I'm not comparing myself to Lovecraft as a person or as a writer, but the rough outline of his life gave me something to aspire to. I don't know what would have become of me if I hadn't discovered Lovecraft."
Author: Thomas Ligotti

49. "But how many chose to ignore the direct attack they laid on what is fed to all of us as 'life,' with its well-defined roads to factory and pool-hall, to work and pleasure, both organized, both shells, both a continuation of existence by forced means, in the shadow of life?"
Author: Tom McDonough

50. "Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror."
Author: Vasily Grossman

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