Human Existence Quotes - Page 9

• A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

  Carl Jung

  Passion, Men, Light

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• The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

  Aberjhani

  Writing, Reality, Mirrors

  Aberjhani (2014). “Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry”, p.4, Lulu.com

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• Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

  Aberjhani

  Love, Spiritual, Men

  Aberjhani (2014). “Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry”, p.17, Lulu.com

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• Oh my God!" said one of the Ambers. "Is this not the worst trip ever? Did you see the snow?" She was a sharp one, this Amber. What would she notice next? The train? The moon? The hilarious vagaries of human existence? Her own head?

  Maureen Johnson

  Moon, Snow, Amber

  John Green, Lauren Myracle, Maureen Johnson (2009). “Let It Snow: Three Holiday Stories”, p.19, Penguin

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• Yes, I'm often reminded of her, and in one of my array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt - an immense leap of an attempt - to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.

  Markus Zusak

  Pockets, Stories, Legion

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• Human existence basically is──a never to be completed imperfect tense.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Imperfect, Tense, Existence

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• We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Lonely, Loneliness, Dying

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

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• Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

  Carl Jung

  Letting Go, Ego, Midlife

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• Paganism is that view of life which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties. Very different is the Christian ideal. Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart.

  John Gresham Machen

  Christian, Heart, Optimistic

  John Gresham Machen (1923). “Christianity and Liberalism”, p.65, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength --or else we die.

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Lying, Heart, Desire

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1999). “Sister of My Heart”, Doubleday Books

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• To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

  N. Scott Momaday

  Space, Forever, Devil

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• Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.

  James G. Frazer

  Buddhism, Blow, Roots

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• The problem of money dogs our steps throughout the whole of our lives, exerting a pressure that, in its way, is as powerful and insistent as any other problem of human existence. And it haunts the spiritual search as well.

  Jacob Needleman

  Spiritual, Dog, Powerful

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• But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a compromise with being, a concession to the blunder of creation itself. We should be able to do better, and we can. To have our egos killed off is second-best to killing off death and all the squalid byplay that flitters around it. So let all lands be small, and grower smaller and smaller until no lands are left where any human footstep need press itself upon the earth.

  Thomas Ligotti

  Land, Ego, Needs

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• Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

  Milan Kundera

  Kitsch, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Existence

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, (Part Six: The Grand March), 1984.

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• There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

  Milan Kundera

  Philosophy, Problem, Metaphysical

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• I see love, like art, as an obsession. Maybe that's an overly romantic view of human existence, but I'm an overly romantic human being. If love, like rock and roll, doesn't consume me 24-7, it's not love. It can be respect, appreciation, admiration, wonderment, it can be a world of glory and a lifetime of peace, but I can't call it love. Love burns me and confuses me. Love's a light that can't be extinguished.

  Scott Weiland

  Appreciation, Art, Light

  Scott Weiland (2011). “Not Dead & Not for Sale: A Memoir”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• These three things-work, will, success-fill human existences. Will opens the door to success, both brilliant and happy. Work passes these doors, and at the end of the journey success comes in to crown one's efforts.

  Louis Pasteur

  Success, Journey, Doors

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• Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

  Rowan Williams

  Religious, Thinking, Long

  Rowan Williams (2007). “Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief”, p.50, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• Speak the truth.
  Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
  and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
  Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
  All growth is not good.
  The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
  There is such a thing as enough.

  Donella Meadows

  Luxury, Growth, Purpose

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• Jesus came to reveal God to us. He is the defining word on God—on what the heart of God is truly like, on what God is up to in the world, and on what God is up to in your life. An intimate encounter with Jesus is the most transforming experience of human existence. To know him as he is, is to come home. To have his life, joy, love, and presence cannot be compared. A true knowledge of Jesus is our greatest need and our greatest happiness. To be mistaken about him is the saddest mistake of all.

  John Eldred

  Jesus, Mistake, Home

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• The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life.

  Erik Naggum

  Purpose, Existence, Humans

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• The best society, the best human existence, arrives when humans most closely determine the truth, and act on the truth, and separate it from superstition, falsity, or misinformation. And there is no better system for determining the truth than free speech: Testing the validity of an idea in the waters of public discussion and debate.

  Dave Rodgers

  Truth, Ideas, Water

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• Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Dream, Sex, Sight

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• We declare that only man exists. This is not to say that material, inorganic nature and nonhuman beings-animals and plants-are in any sense unreal, insubstantial, or illusory because they do not so exist. We merely state that the reality of these nonhuman realms differs from that of human existence, whose primary characteristic is Da-sein (literally being-the-there)... Man as man is present... in a manner wholly different from... inanimate things.

  Medard Boss

  Animal, Reality, Men

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