Quotes about existence

page 15

“whiskey makes the heart beat faster
but it sure doesn't help the
mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just
from the deadly drone of
existence?”

“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

“Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.”

“I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Work, my dear Blushweaver, is like fertilizer.”
“It smells?”
He smiled. “No, I was thinking that work is like fertilizer in that I’m glad it exists; I just don’t ever want to get stuck in it.”

“It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.”

“God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn’t press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere. I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest.”

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.”

“And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.”

“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.”

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go?”

“If people were more concerned with how they looked on the inside, then on the outside, the world would be a nicer place to exist.”

“Truth only exists for those who cling to it.
"Sosuke Aizen”

“The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.”

“All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”

“What do I want?
The answer to that question does not exist.”

“pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.”

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”

“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”

“In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.”

“Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence”

“Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.”

“As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist.”

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

“We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.”

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

“Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.”

“The song we’re composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.”

“I wonder what it feels like to have no desires left because you have satisfied them all, smothered them with money even before they are born. Is an existence without desire very desirable? And is the poverty of desire better than rank poverty itself?”

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

“Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.”

“Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?”

“Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.”

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”

“I live because I do not exist.”

“She had made the choice for him - in a moment of flight and panic, but she had made it - not realizing that her Jace would rather die than be like this, and that she'd been not so much saving his life as damning him to an existence he would despise.”

“… in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.”

“They kissed for the sort of endless moment that only exists between lovers whose lips are still new territory to one another.”

“I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”

“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”

“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”

“She would consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences.”

“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation”

“Nice to know I have that effect on boys. I mean, Christopher doesn't even know I exist, and Brandon Stark practically throws up when he sees me. Having my brain transplated into a supermodel's body was doing wonders for my love life.”

“Everything in existence undergoes constant change. The things that surround us, even our selves are temporary manifestations of Ki energy.”

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”

“The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.”

“Contentment and happiness didn't exist in my life for more than a few moments at a time, and they were really only illusionary. There was always something hidden. Lying in wait to spring up and ruin everything.”

“But whether or not you are here, you are here—because these words are for you, and they wouldn't exist if you weren't here in some way.”

“I guess what I'm trying to say is that you two make me believe that true love really exists. And that even the darkest hours can't take that away.”

“You can't be real," Delilah murmurs.
"Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?”

“Knowing the precies answers is not as crucial as the certainty that the answers do, in fact, exist.”

“I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.”

“I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.”

“Kids, the fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.”

“Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn't mean it does not exist.”

“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

“Then spoke the thunder
DA Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.”

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

“He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.”

“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”

“I hope suffering don't exist.”

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

“I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”

“Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.”

“Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.”

“The very reason for nature's existence is for the education of the soul.”

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

“Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see”

“Men exist because a vibrator can't fix a flat tire. On second thought, I should just buy a AAA card…”

“But just because you bury something, that doesn’t mean it stops existing.”

“I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself.”

“I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.”

“A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn't exist, guess what? Neither do true friends.”

“Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.”

“What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then - with great forgiveness and fortitude - dismissing them.”

“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”

“Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.”

“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”

“We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.”

“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”

“Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?”

“I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I… because… ugh!”

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”

“To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs…”

“Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.”

“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.”

“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”

“I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

“Life is full of screwups. You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existance.”

“When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.”

“Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.”

“More exists among human beings than can be answered by the simplistic question I'm hit with every day of my life: "Are you a man or a woman?”

“All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

“Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?”

“I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God.”

“For the first time in his existence, he knew he was drowning and he wasn't thinking about survival.”