Existence Quotes - Page 16

• Take hold of your own life. See that the whole existence is celebrating. These trees are not serious, these birds are not serious. The rivers and the oceans are wild, and everywhere there is fun, everywhere there is joy and delight. Watch existence, listen to the existence and become part of it.

  Rajneesh

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Fun

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• One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Art, Giving, Ifs

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• As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

  Richard Russo

  Sleep, Thinking, Two

  FaceBook post by Richard Russo from Dec 28, 2010

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• Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Evil, Morality, Human Nature

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• Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Struggle, Autumn, Self

  Sue Monk Kidd (2016). “When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• I am convinced by the events of the last few weeks that nefarious forces of people--unidentified but no less real--are threatening life as we know it, and in fact, may be bent on unraveling the very fabric of our existence.

  Christopher Moore

  Real, People, Events

  Christopher Moore (2009). “A Dirty Job: A Novel”, p.29, Harper Collins

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• He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reading, Sleep, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.166, Tyché

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

  Zoë Heller

  Possession, Thinness, Confronting

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• What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

  Oscar Wilde

  Artist, Soul And Body, Inward

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.170, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

  Charles Baxter

  Two, Say Anything, Problem

  Charles Baxter (2009). “The Feast of Love”, p.77, Vintage

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• A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

  Clifford Geertz

  Motivation, Powerful, Men

  Clifford Geertz (2017). “The Interpretation of Cultures”, p.98, Hachette UK

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• It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

  Albert Einstein

  Order, Feelings, Desire

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• Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.

  Stephen King

  Reality, Soul, Brain

  Stephen King (2016). “The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger”, p.240, Simon and Schuster

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• Existence is an imperfection.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Imperfection

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2013). “Nausea”, p.93, New Directions Publishing

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• But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Determination, Rain, Voice

  Yasunari Kawabata, Rudyard Kipling, Sinclair Lewis (1971). “Nobel Prize Library”

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• You know that I could as soon forget you as my existence!

  Emily Bronte

  Forget You, Forget, Knows

  Emily Bronte (1858). “Wuthering Heights”, p.139

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• It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.

  Joseph Conrad

  Dream, Struggle, Essence

  "Heart of Darkness". Book by Joseph Conrad, 1902.

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• Figuratively, they escaped from Cout Olaf and their miserable existence. They did not literally escape, because they were still in his house and vulnerable to Olaf's evil in loco parentis ways.

  Daniel Handler

  Evil, House, Olaf

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• In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, everyone who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find the enviable existence

  John Stuart Mill

  Law, Intellectual, Liberty

  John Stuart Mill (2017). “Utilitarianism”, p.13, Coventry House Publishing

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• I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Book, Silence, Would Be

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• You were born into a state of grace. It is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in a state of grace whether or not special words are spoken for you, or water or oil is poured upon your head. You share this blessing with the animals and all other living things. You cannot fall out of grace, nor can it be taken from you. You can ignore it. You can hold beliefs that blind you to its existence. You will still be graced but unable to perceive you own uniqueness and integrity, and blind also to other attributes with which you are automatically gifted.

  Jane Roberts

  Integrity, Fall, Taken

  Jane Roberts (2011). “The Nature of Personal Reality (A Seth Book): Specific, Practical Techniques for Solving Everyday Problems and Enriching the Life You Know”, p.203, Amber-Allen Publishing

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• What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

  Audre Lorde

  Dying, Faces, Accepting

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.12, Crossing Press

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• The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

  A. S. Byatt

  Wisdom, Community, Ephemeral

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Dec 17, 2011

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• He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed

  Margaret Atwood

  Trying, Has Beens

  Margaret Atwood (2012). “Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986”, p.125, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Might, Lasts, Ends

  Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1960.

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