Quotes About Existence
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Albert Camus
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
Albert Einstein
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
Aldous Huxley
The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.
Epicurus
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
James Joyce
The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.
Aristotle
In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.
Oscar Wilde
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London
In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.
Erik Erikson
It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
Edgar Allen Poe
Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.
Eckhart Tolle
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
Henry David Thoreau
I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.
James Joyce
The whole existence of man is a ceaseless duel between the forces of life and death.
Mahatma Gandhi
If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.
Charles Bukowski
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
Virginia Woolf
Being is the great explainer.
Henry David Thoreau
Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying out of it; and of that which is coming into existence part is already extinguished.
Marcus Aurelius
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Richard Dawkins
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence.
Norman Vincent Peale
No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
James Joyce
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes – every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man.
Orison Swett Marden
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Aldous Huxley
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’
Viktor E. Frankl
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
Sigmund Freud
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Terence McKenna
Existence is Identity, consciousness is identification.
Ayn Rand
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London
Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
Charles Dickens
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Jung
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
Terence McKenna
Man’s love is of man’s life a part; it is a woman’s whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
Lord Byron
Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.
Simone De Beauvoir
Have any other quotes about existence you think deserve to be in this collection? Is there one that’s your favorite? Let me know in the comments.
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