Existence Quotes - Page 22

• Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

  John Wyndham

  Treasure, Precarious

  John Wyndham (1951). “The Day of the Triffids”, Fawcett

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• Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.

  Brian Greene

  Wrestling, Dark, Would Be

  Brian Greene (2007). “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality”, p.5, Vintage

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• The way of peace is a soul journey. . . . If you can live from the level of your soul, you are doing something very special. The important thing is how much consciousness you add to the whole of human existence, for that is how eternity expresses itself, like a lamp shining through the window of eternity.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Journey, Shining

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• I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.

  Daniel Clowes

  Dream, Spiritual, Believe

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• Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.

  David Brooks

  School, Self, Expression

  David Brooks (2011). “The Paradise Suite: Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive”, p.18, Simon and Schuster

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• The way you argued with me, you would have thought that we were debating the existence of God or whether or not we should move in together. These kinds of fights can never be won – even if you’re the victor, you’ve hurt the other person, and there has to be some loss associated with that.

  David Levithan

  Hurt, Moving, Fighting

  David Levithan (2011). “The Lover's Dictionary: A Novel”, p.10, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Emptiness, Existentialism, Praying

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• Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.

  Huey Newton

  Way, Violent

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• Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Dream, Lying, Moving

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, David Luke (1998). “Faust”, p.48, Oxford University Press, USA

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• At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

  Jon Krakauer

  Cutting, Long, Parent

  Jon Krakauer (2011). “Into the Wild”, p.22, Pan Macmillan

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• The first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.

  Jack London

  Struggle, Decay, Pieces

  Jack London (2009). “The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories”, p.21, Oxford Paperbacks

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• When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

  Flann O'Brien

  Sleep, Men, Blood

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• Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Hands, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Mar 02, 2017

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• I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence -- I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides.

  Neil Peart

  Spiritual, Baby, Art

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• There must be only three supreme values which govern a person's life: Reason, Purpose, and Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge--Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve--Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

  Ayn Rand

  Honesty, Integrity, Self Esteem

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• Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Suicide, Thursday, Spices

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1997). “The Mistress of Spices”, Doubleday

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• It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

  Ayn Rand

  Letting Go, Pain, Views

  Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.907, Penguin

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• It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

  H. L. Mencken

  Children, Men, Political

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.371, Knopf

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• Must you know that yours will be the “better” picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty? Must a rose be “better” than an iris in order to justify it’s existence? I tell you this: you are all flowers in the Garden of the Gods.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Flower, Garden, Expression

  Neale Donald Walsch (2002). “Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dialogue”, p.212, Penguin

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• There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark.

  Jacques Rigaut

  People, Larks, Charity

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• Nothing makes time pass or shortens the way like a thought that absorbs in itself all the faculties of the one who is thinking. External existence is then like a sleep of which this thought is the dream. Under its influence, time has no more measure, space has no more distance.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Dream, Distance, Sleep

  Alexandre Dumas (2006). “The Three Musketeers: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.234, Penguin

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• The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.

  Thomas Mann

  Beautiful, Confusing, Accessories

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• And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks

  Tom Robbins

  Sublime, Tasks, Goes On

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• The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Children, Lying, Angel

  Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.143, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.

  Tom Robbins

  Party, Anxiety, Agitation

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Jitterbug Perfume”, p.49, Bantam

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