“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
“The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.”
Aristotle
“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
“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
William James
“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
“No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
Aldous Huxley
“The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“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
“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
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
“I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.”
Epicurus
“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.”
Erik Erikson
“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
“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
Aldous Huxley
“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
“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”
Virginia Woolf
“Being is the great explainer.”
Henry David Thoreau
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“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
“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 is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“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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