Existence Quotes - Page 24

• 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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• I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me- holds my mind in mortmain. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still and merely breathe- like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass.

  W.N.P. Barbellion

  Lying, Book, Feet

  W. N. P. Barbellion (1919). “The Journal of a Disappointed Man”

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• The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche. I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.

  Alexander Shulgin

  Memories, White, Availability

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• How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "On the Heights of Despair". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1934.

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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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• As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.

  Suzanne Collins

  Pain, Coal, Pearls

  Suzanne Collins (2013). “The Hunger Games Complete Trilogy”, p.504, Scholastic UK

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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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• If there was one weapon he had against these savages, it was not acknowledging their existence.

  Melina Marchetta

  Savages, Weapons, Ifs

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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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• I was in my house, alone in the living room, anxious about you, watching the flashes of lightning. And a flash of lightning lit up this truth for me, right in front of my eye. That night i lost you, I lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person

  Haruki Murakami

  Eye, Night, Who I Am

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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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• Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

  Kate Chopin

  Children, Inward, Awakening

  Kate Chopin (1899). “The Awakening”, p.35

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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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• Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.

  Franz Kafka

  Sun, Misery, Deny

  Franz Kafka (2015). “Aphorisms”, p.112, Schocken

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• She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Real, Self, Hands

  "Anna Karenina".

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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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• Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.

  John Green

  Children, Sick, Want

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.110, Penguin

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• I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

  Guy de Maupassant

  Night, Men, Air

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