Existence Quotes - Page 18

• Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

  Louise Glück

  Summer, Night, Joy

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• You’re pretty sharp, Clive. Do you believe in God?” Clive smiled. “I don’t know, should I?” Actually, approaching the matter from a purely logical perspective, yes. All the evidence points to the existence of a creator. The single greatest body of evidence is the dismal failure of man’s desperate attempts to come up with a reasonable alternative, beginning with evolution. I’ve always looked at the universe and seen a creator as plainly as most people who look at the ocean see water.

  Ted Dekker

  Believe, Ocean, Men

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• Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

  Edith Wharton

  Real, Past, Atmosphere

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• It's true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive -- someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn't exist, or isn't yours. No, no! They don't even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and tell you where you're heading and...Someone to soak up all the yearning. That's what I think.

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  Love You, Thinking, Arrows

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• The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Beautiful, Morning, Moon

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.119, Macmillan

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• I scarcely remember counting upon happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.

  John Keats

  Rights, Looks, Sparrows

  John Keats (2015). “John Keats - The Man Behind The Lyrics: Life, letters, and literary remains: Complete Letters and Two Extensive Biographies of one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.584, e-artnow

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• So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Love, Beautiful, Lying

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• There are friends with whom we share neither interests nor any particular experiences, friends with whom we never correspond, whom we seldom meet and then only by chance, but whose existence nonetheless has for us a special if uncanny meaning. For me the Eiffel Tower is just such a friend, and not merely because it happens to be the symbol of a city, for Paris leaves me neither hot nor cold. I first became aware of this attachment of mine when reading in the paper about plans for its demolition, the mere thought of which filled me with alarm.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Reading, Attachment, Cities

  Stanislaw Lem (1984). “The Chain of Chance”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Book, Dark, Ideas

  Clifton Fadiman (1988). “The lifetime reading plan”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Long, Effort, Littles

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892). “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”, p.55

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• More than honor, more than life, I love thee." What do you say when a man whose entire existence had been his honor offers to give it up for you? You say the only thing you can. More than any crown or throne or title, I love thee," I said. "more than any power in faerie, I love thee.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Men, Giving, Honor

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• We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands...searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living...for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences...Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.

  Hillary Clinton

  Integrity, Struggle, Political

  Commencement Speech, Wellesley College, www.wellesley.edu. 1969.

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• The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence.

  Wade Davis

  Fabric, Earth, Sun

  Wade Davis (2009). “Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures”, p.64, D & M Publishers

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• I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Writing, Men, Museums

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• 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

  Struggle, Silly, Mind

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.15, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• 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?

  Charles Bukowski

  Heart, Mind, Drones

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• I was taught that candles are like house cats - domesticated versions of something wild and dangerous. There's no way to know how much of that killer instinct lurks in the darkness. I used to think the house-burning paranoia was the result of some upper-middle-class fear regarding the potential destruction of a half-million-dollar Westchester house the size of a matchbox. But then I realized the fear stemmed from something far less complex: we're not used to fire. Candles are a staple of the Judaic existence and, like many suburban residents before us, we're pretty bad Jews.

  Sloane Crosley

  Cat, Thinking, Fire

  Sloane Crosley (2008). “I Was Told There'd Be Cake”, p.15, Penguin

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• For paradise we long. For perfection we were made...This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives...This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for...nothing less than perfect communion with the...one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together...we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled...The only death to fear is the death of settling for something less.

  Richard John Neuhaus

  Perfect, Long, Promise

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• What the word God means is the mystery really. It's the mystery that we face as humans the mystery of existence, of suffering and of death.

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  Ram Dass

  God, Mean, Suffering

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• I have never felt any rest in sleep. For a few seconds I am numbed, then a new life begins, freed from the conditions of time and space, and doubtless similar to that state which awaits us after death. Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to unite them now?

  Gerard De Nerval

  Sleep, Two, Space

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• Existence has overpowered Books. Today I slew a Mushroom.

  Emily Dickinson

  Book, Mushrooms, Today

  Emily Dickinson, Thomas Herbert Johnson, Theodora Ward (1986). “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”, p.525, Harvard University Press

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• When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)

  John Berger

  Reality, Imagination, Earth

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• Compassion is the chief law of human existence.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Kindness, Compassion, Law

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2006). “The Idiot: Easyread Large Edition”, p.129, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The vermin explain their sin with sanctimonious language like, "We've prayed about it and sought counsel, and we feel it's the right thing to do." Don't let it down on them that to the Enemy what they feel is inconsequential. His moral laws don't give a rip about how any of them feel. The sludgebags have no more power to vote them in and out of existence than they have power to revoke the law of gravity.

  Randy Alcorn

  Rip, Law, Giving

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• I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Believe, Practice, Elements

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