Quotes about existence
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“I would like to be able to gently drift in and out of existence when I wanted to.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: Solipsist

“You can't prove that something doesn't exist. You can only prove that something does exist.”

John Connolly book The Gates

Source: The Gates

“I try to find meaning anywhere I can. It's the only way I know how to validate my existence.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: God-Shaped Hole

Way

“I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You know, feeling and action are always linked, one can't exist without the other. It's sort of a hippie thing.-Wes”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

Feeling

“We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Peace

“You can never know about about your own destiny: are the people you meet there to play a part on your oun destiny, or do you exist just to play a role in theirs?”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

People, Parting

“I can't think again. Not ever again. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Thinking, Sleep

“That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Sense

“The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Variant: The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Source: A Clockwork Orange

Life, Evil

“Culture carries no privilege to exist. Cultures do not have value simply because they are. Some cultures, the world is better off without.”

Terry Goodkind (1948) American novelist

World

“That was the whole point of being special: You existed to make sure everyone else behaved, but that didn't mean YOU had to.”

Scott Westerfeld book Specials

Source: Specials

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995

Truth, Secret

“and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended”

Stephen King book Wizard and Glass

Source: Wizard and Glass

Heart

“Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“I am for who i was in the beginning but now is present and i exist in the future.”

Frank McCourt book Angela's Ashes

Source: Angela's Ashes

Future

“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.”

Leo Tolstoy book Family Happiness

Variant: I want movement, not a calm course of existence. I want excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feel in myself a superabundance of energy which finds no outlet in our quiet life.
Source: Family Happiness

Love, Life, Chance

“Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.”

Herman Wouk book The Winds of War

Source: The Winds of War

Love, War, Fear, Peace

“Perfection' is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe…. If you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do.”

David D. Burns (1942) American psychiatrist

Universe, Perfection

“It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Cry

“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Love, Truth

“Love is not to be proven or measured… It exists, and that is enough.”

Jorge Amado (1912–2001) Brazilian writer

Source: Gabriela, Clavo y Canela

Love

“Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.”

Yann Martel book Beatrice and Virgil

Source: Beatrice and Virgil

Family, Animals

“No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women… When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 12.
Source: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 13-14.
Context: Recent focus on the issue of racism has generated discourse but has had little impact on the behavior of white feminists towards black women. Often the white women who are busy publishing papers and books on "unlearning racism" remain patronizing and condescending when they relate to black women. This is not surprising given that frequently their discourse is aimed solely in the direction of a white audience and the focus solely on changing attitudes rather than addressing racism in a historical and political context. They make us the "objects" of their privileged discourse on race. As "objects," we remain unequals, inferiors. Even though they may be sincerely concerned about racism, their methodology suggests they are not yet free of the type of remain intact if they are to maintain their authoritative positions.
Context: Racist stereotypes of the strong, superhuman black woman are operative myths in the minds of many white women, allowing them to ignore the extent to which black women are likely to be victimized in this society and the role white women may play in the maintenance and perpetuation of that victimization.... By projecting onto black women a mythical power and strength, white women both promote a false image of themselves as powerless, passive victims and deflect attention away from their aggressiveness, their power, (however limited in a white supremacist, male-dominated state) their willingness to dominate and control others. These unacknowledged aspects of the social status of many white women prevent them from transcending racism and limit the scope of their understanding of women's overall social status in the United States. Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and focus on class and gender, they tend to dismiss race or they make a point of acknowledging that race is important and then proceed to offer an analysis in which race is not considered.

Women, Men, People

“The question, O me! so sad, recurring -
What good amid these, O me, O life?
That you are here - that life
exists and identity,
that the powerful play goes on,
and you may contribute a verse.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Source: The Leaves of Grass

Life, Sadness, Question

“When multiple explanations exist, the simplest is usually correct.”

Dan Brown book Deception Point

Source: Deception Point

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination — what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

Truth, Beauty, Imagination, Heart

“He hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself smaller in the seat. He wanted to disappear, to fade away, not to exist.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

“Existence is an imperfection.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

World

“Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Parting

“It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

God

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Hunger

“I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.”

Wilhelm Reich book Listen, Little Man!

Source: Listen, Little Man!

Love, God, Nature, Thinking

“There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

“Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Love, Books, Heart

“The great object of life is sensation- to feel that we exist, even though in pain.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Life, Pain, Feeling

“Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size…)”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Nature's God

“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.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol I
Source: Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Faith, Science

“Perfection does not exist -- you can always do better and you can always grow.”

Les Brown (1945) American politician

Perfection

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”

Guy De Maupassant book Suicides

"Suicides"

Life, World, Universe, Memory

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

World

“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

People

“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)
Source: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
Context: Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.

Star, Reading, Drawing

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

Death, Intelligence, Thinking

“Keep in mind, just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that one does not exist. You simply haven’t discovered it yet.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

Gilles Deleuze book Dialogues

Source: Dialogues

Way

“Sometimes when I'm alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread, the strong arms that warded off nightmares on the train, the kisses in the arena. To make myself put a name to the thing I've lost. But what's the use? It's gone. He's gone. Whatever existed between us is gone. All that's left is my promise to kill Snow. I tell myself this ten times a day.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (p. 195)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

Boy, Kiss, Strong, Time

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace

Love

“Dear Depression, please keep your distance. Don’t be nasty. Find some other person with more reason than me to look in the mirror and say: “What a pointless existence.” Whether you like it or not, I know how to defeat you. You’re wasting your time.”

Paulo Coelho book Adultery

Source: Adultery

Time, Personality

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”

Thomas Bernhard book Woodcutters

Source: Woodcutters

Life

“I desire therefore I exist.”

Angela Carter book The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Source: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

World, Parent

“Of all treasures of knowledge, the most vital is the knowledge of God, his existence, powers, love, and promises.”

Spencer W. Kimball (1895–1985) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Source: Faith Precedes the Miracle

Love, God, Knowledge

“He seemed only… annoyed. Annoyed, and sweaty, and hot.
"Yeah, well," he said, "the next time you decide to sneak out of our magically warded apartment through a door that shouldn't really exist, leave a note.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Time

“In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Life

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.”

Marilynne Robinson book Housekeeping

Source: Housekeeping

World

“It means that there's only one love for everyone who exists. And when you meet that love, you know them. You know you were meant to be together, and nothing can keep you apart.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 2

Love

“If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.”

Dave Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Source: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Just knowing you exist changed the world for me.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: God-Shaped Hole

For Him, For Boyfriend, World, Change

“It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It’s impossible, and if it isn’t impossible, it’s irrelevant, and if it isn’t either of those things, it’s embarrassing.”

Philip Pullman book The Subtle Knife

Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 4 : Trepanning

Sense

“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Way, Understanding, Effort, Change

“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Way, Literature

“In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.”

Marguerite Duras book Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Source: Blue Eyes, Black Hair

World, Time

“Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Love, Fear, Art

“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”

Rachel Carson book The Sea Around Us

Source: The Sea Around Us

Life, Way, Change, Sea

“Kabuto: It's always easier said than done. I just said that this jutsu had no weaknesses or risk…

Itachi: Every jutsu has its weakness. This jutsu's weakness and risk is… the existence of me!”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

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

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Men

“All that existed was Jace; all she felt, hoped, breathed, wanted, and saw was Jace. Nothing else mattered.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Hope

“You’re a wondering soul, looking for a peace that doesn’t exist. Lost you will be until you find the one inner truth. We can never hide from what we are. The only hope is to embrace it.’ (Old Seer)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Truth, Peace, Hope, Soul

“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery. (Steve Jobs)”

Walter Isaacson book Steve Jobs

Source: Steve Jobs

Religion, Thinking, Housing

“Because reason… is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us…”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Men

“Truly, whoever we are, wherever we reside, we exist upon the whim of murderers.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“If the devil doesn't exist… how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

People

“As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Pain, Beauty

“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”

Jan Morris (1926) British historian

Pleasure, Books, Lovers, Understanding

“Ever since we had arrived in the United States, my classmates kept asking me about magic carpets.
- They don't exist-I always said. I was wrong. Magic carpets do exist. But they are called library cards.”

Firoozeh Dumas (1965) Iranian-American memoirist

Source: Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad

“Here was a boy who liked flaws, who saw them not as failings but as strengths. Who knew such a person could exist, or what would have happened if we'd found each other under different circumstances? Maybe in a perfect world. But not in this one.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

World, Boy, Personality, Perfection

“You are mine, woman, and I am yours. Until you, my life was desolate. I existed, but I didn't truly live. Now I live, even in my death.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Night

Life, Death

“I will clamber through the clouds and exist.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends

“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans book Là-Bas

Source: Là-Bas

Life, Literature, Thinking, Personality

“I welcome each new day with a hopeful expectancy that I, too, will rise above the ordinary. For I am not content to live a merely "normal" life or settle for an average existence. No, I am destined for more--much, much more.”

Melody Carlson (1956) American writer

Source: Finding Alice

Life, Hope

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Universe

“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.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

God, Problem

“Not all is certainty in our world, Karigan. If it were there'd be no opportunity for faith; and then it would be a very dull existence.”

Kristen Britain The High King's Tomb

Source: The High King's Tomb

World, Faith

“Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.”

Anthony Horowitz book The House of Silk

Source: The House of Silk

Water

“The existence of other people is essentially awkward.”

Lionel Shriver book Checker and the Derailleurs

Source: Checker and the Derailleurs

People

“By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.”

Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story

Source: Super Sad True Love Story

Reading

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Life, Men, Children, Nature

“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Love, Life, Chance

“One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

World

“Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Source: Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

Life, Fight

“In the end, I must proclaim that no good can be achieved of false means. For the substance of our existence is not in the achievement, but in the method.”

Brandon Sanderson book The Way of Kings

Source: The Way of Kings

Falseness

“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 afterwards.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism, lecture http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm (1946) <br class="br">Context: 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 afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.

World