c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There's nothing as useful as the truth, in terms of ruining anyone's day, week, month, year, decade, or life… Unless, of course, you own a remotely operated automatic flamethrower-drone-tower and have some marinated pork-chops on your person, to lure unsuspecting dogs in close proximity to it, but since dogs don’t really have lives - by using this specific method of torture, you can only improve the remaining few seconds of their existence.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
Why are we here? Is there, really, some intelligent design? Why do we cry for someone who leaves us, if there's some Grand Pearly Gate in the sky? Why worry about how we build our lives if the ultimate ending for all is death, a single breath away?
— Ellen Hopkins, Tilt
Everything which helps us to exist is holy! And a tree is holiest of the holy for us!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Everyone is folding boxes. Andrew is folding boxes. If the entire job were to fold boxes people would scream. They would fold, and sometimes scream, existentially, then be dragged into a field and beaten into a paste. Sometimes there would be a killing rampage.
— Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee
Find a calm lake and wait for the twilight in silence! There, existence will visit you with all its magnificence! The existence of the Existence can best be felt in the presence of dimness and in the absence of crowds and noises!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.
— Marilynne Robinson
Accepting the nonexistence of being,when the absence of existence means the negation of being.
— Marieta Maglas- Eschatological Regression
Hold the Earth tightly and fondly because you owe your existence to the Earth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
This is God's universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden, then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
What shall I take with me?Will I let nothing behind me over the earth?How shall my heart act?Is it that we come in vain to live,to sprout over the earth?Let us leave at least flowers,let us leave at least songs.
— Nezahualcóyotl
Existence is governed by its own law. Here, the things impermanent by natureare bound to meet their end. Hence, with the passage of time, not only Ravana'sLanka but "Krishna's" Dwarka also sinks.
— Deep Trivedi, The Pulse of Wisdom
If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature, In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuses behind us, no justification before us. We are alone with no excuses.This is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet in other respects is free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
It's both a blessing and a curse to see a woman's beauty!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
— Thomas Mann
Existence was never originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
Sooner or later everything that exists ceases to exist, and then something comes along to take its place, but not always something better.
— Dmitry Bakin, Reasons for Living
When it comes to fighting for your rights don't fold hands but turn them into fists.
— Amit Abraham
Coming out of the Tunnel....I am bursting with a new found feeling of my own existence.Strong and powerful frequencies.My mind is wandering to wide open fields and long-forgotten lands with limitless possibilities. I am not quite there yet.Holding still in anticipation,don’t want to miss hearing my inner voice – soft and deep.With me are friendly skies on rainy days and my life is getting warmer.
— Anna Asche
How can one be so serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous?
— Kakuzō Okakura
Necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meaning. Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist. That's what you call dramaturgy.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
...on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.
— Dean Koontz, Saint Odd
We are all tied to the burdens of this existence, and it seems as if everyday renewal is occurring in our lives and those around us.
— Kat Lahr, A Time Of Renewal
We seek not for forgiveness, but the freedom and time to do more than ‘exist’.
— Fennel Hudson, Wild Carp - Fennel's Journal - No. 4
For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want – but an end?
— Isaac Asimov, The Last Answer
I do not love. Love is only for women who are complete. I cannot love while my heart lacks safety and in my wallet there is enough money to pay for a loaf of bread. I cannot kiss you while I am thinking of the house rent and the electricity bills. I cannot behave as a mature woman who can exchange with you phrases of love while my childhood is not yet complete. This is an unfair compromise for safety and for existence.  We only call it love to preserve our dignity.
— jihad eltabey
here was no way of knowing what path he would take from there, but in order to survive as a human being, he was sure to arrive at the fate of having to incur the dislike of other human beings. When that time came, he would probably clothe himself inconspicuously, so as not to attract attention, and beggarlike, linger about the market places of man, in search of something.
— Sōseki Natsume, And Then
You're born thinking you're the centre of things, and they chip away at that until you expire muttering If I knew then, or some nonsense in an empty rooming house.
— Mark Anthony Jarman, Salvage King, YA!: A Herky-Jerky Picaresque
It's way too easy to get used to losing, it does something small to you.
— Mark Anthony Jarman, Salvage King, YA!: A Herky-Jerky Picaresque
Religion is the sense of comprehension of the totality of existence.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
To smile is to turn the lights on, the lights of existence within you!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Only when we love one another do we exist. We only truly know one another when we love one another because we share with them our true selves. In who's mind do you exist when nobody knows the true you? Love is the only thing that can bring 'you' into existence... start by loving 'that person' and you will not fear bringing them into existence for others to discover and love, rather you will fear having them never been seen or met by anyone as if they never even existed.
— Byron Christos
The simplicity of existence is that it is. The complexity of existence is that it is not.
— Réné Gaudette
That which is not comprehended by the mind but by which the mind comprehends—know that...
— Prabhavananda, The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit
What keeps all living things busy and in motion is the striving to exist. But when existence is secured, they do not know what to do: that is why the second thing that sets them in motion is a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, not to feel it any longer, 'to kill time', i.e. to escape boredom.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1
Only knowledge can turn life's unbearableness into a weapon.
— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
God draws near to us in such a way as to draw us near to himself within the circle of his knowing of himself.
— Thomas F. Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement
So," said the Russian, after regaining is composure, "the lesson of the model is that the universe——all its matter and forms of energy——arise out of thought.
— Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
I cannot say that I know Brahman fully.Nor can I say that I know him not....Nor do I know that I know him not.
— Prabhavananda, The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit
It seems to me that the whole of human life can be summed up in the one statement that man only exists for the purpose of proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not an organ.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
More likely, they would just cease to exist.""That's death.""No, it's different. Death leaves a corps.
— Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
Perhaps the saddest part of coexistence is the concept of interdependence being necessary for any form of solidarity to be realized. Being encouraged to lean on the weak, does not sound like a long term viable solution to attaining strength.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building
—  for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry’s attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads - now here is a fellow who does have a “flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it.
Let me not anchor you to a bed of weary rocks, but let me be the kite’s string that guides you in your flight.
— Richard Ronald Allan, Exit Eleonora
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
— Yukio Mishima
Remember that existence comes before the happiness and thus to exist is more important than to be happy!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Making of Zombie Wars
Carry me like change in your pocket and spend me as you wish.
— Richard Ronald Allan, Exit Eleonora
Physical existence is finite.- Sagar Gorijala.
— Sagar Gorijala
When I doubt that I exist, I pinch myself.
— Dalai Lama XIV
Each day of your existence ready’s itself for your impact
— Todd Stocker
It takes time, or does time take it?
— Anthony Liccione
There are as many ways of loving as there are people, and that wildflower variety is the great beauty of this dimension of existence.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
As I turned over the last page, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among infinite stars? I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.
— Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night
I am a thin layer of all those beings on [samadhi level] 3, mingling, connected with one another in a spherical surface around the whole known universe. Our "backs" are to the void. We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. I am one with them; spread in a thin layer around the sphere with a small, slightly greater concentration of me in one small zone. I feel the power of the galaxy pouring through me. I am following the programme, the conversion programme of void to space, to energy, to matter, to life, to consciousness, to us, the creators. From nothing on one side to the created everything on the other. I am the creation process itself, incredibly strong, incredibly powerful.This time there is no flunking out, no withdrawal, no running away, no unconsciousness, no denial, no negation, no fighting against anything. I am "one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping".I am coming down from level +3. There are a billion choices of where to descend back down. I am conscious down each one of the choices simultaneously. Finally I am in my own galaxy with millions of choices left, hundreds of thousands on my own solar system, tens of thousands on my own planet, hundreds in my own country and then suddenly I am down to two, one of which is this body. In this body I look back up, see the choice-tree above me that I came down.Did I, this Essence, come all the way down to this solar system, this planet, this place, this body, or does it make any difference? May not this body be a vehicle for any Essence that came into it? Are not all Essences universal, equal, anonymous, and equally able? Instructions for this vehicle are in it for each Essence to read and absorb on entry. The new pilot-navigator reads his instructions in storage and takes over, competently operating this vehicle.
— John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: Looking into Inner Space
I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The only existence I know now is the one I was given. An echo of what used to be.
— Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
And for the rest of her life, the girl, the woman, she never made a mark on anyone either that proved anything absolutely for certain, that she could ever see, about what she had done at any time, and this does not break her heart."Cloud
— Diane Williams
The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself, because the self is the product and a part of the total process of human existence. To transform oneself, self-knowledge is essential; without knowing what you are, there is no basis for right thought, and without knowing yourself there cannot be transformation. One must know oneself as on is, not as on wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and there for fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be. To know oneself as one is requires and extraordinary alertness of mind, because what is, is constantly undergoing transformation, change; and to follow it swiftly the mind must not be tethered to any particular dogma or belief, to any particular pattern of action. If you would follow anything, it is no good being tethered. To know yourself, there must be the awareness, the alertness of mind in which there is freedom from all beliefs, from all idealization, because beliefs and ideals only give you a color, perverting true perception. If you want to know what you are, you cannot imagine or have belief in something which you are not. If I am greedy, envious, violent, merely having an ideal of non-violence, of non-greed, is of little value. The understanding of what you are, whatever it be – ugly or beautiful, wicked or mischievous – the understanding of what you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue is essential, for it gives freedom.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
... And I wondered if we had disappointed God so much, that he wrote us off as pets, just alive to entertain.
— Bethany Brookbank, Write like no one is reading
I will say nothing... against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it’s sticking together that’s difficult. Faeces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit: our frenzy to persist in our present state — that’s the unconscionable torture.
— Voyage au bout de la nuit
Life is rather a short walk through eternity. Be they seeds, pups or infants, on the trek they all pick up weight, sensitivity and awareness. Then, much before the end of the run, they deteriorate, lead, legs and lungs. The tragicomedy of existence: the long walk of slow decay.
— Dagobert D. Runes
If something’s existence is contingent upon the existence of another entity, can we truthfully call them separate beings?
— Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times
You are educated when you learn to coexist with othersAnd as a result you enhance the whole existence.
— Debasish Mridha
If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.
— C.G. Jung, Psychological Types
Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.
— Fay Weldon
Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.
— Stefan Zweig
So said Tochihuitzin,so said Coyolchiuhqui:We come out of the dream suddenly,we only come to dream,it isn't true, it isn't truethat we come to live on the earth.Like grass in springis our being.Our heart makes them grow,flowers sprout from our flesh.Some open their corollas,then they become dry.So said Tochihuitzin.
— Nezahualcóyotl
What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.
— Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things
It's supposed to go bing-bing or bong-bong or ding-ding when tires go over it. The one at Dave's stopped working several years ago, and he won't have it fixed because he feels as I do - that none of us need to be reminded we exist.
— Peter Hedges, What's Eating Gilbert Grape
A truly honorable person, would never convince another to stray, from their personal pursuit of honor. No, only one lacking this noble quality would try to justify and market, an existence without it.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Let me sleep," he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror - this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man's door in her face.Instantly, she raised her hand to knock, discovered the rock... she banged on the door with the rock, but not loudly, just enough to let him know how desperate she was to get back in, but not enough to bother him if he didn't want to answer.He didn't. No sound, no movement of the door. Nothing but the void."Tony?" she gasped, pressing her ear to the door. Silence. "Okay," she said numbly; clutching her rock she walked unsteadily across the porch toward her own living quarters.The rock vanished. Her hand felt nothing."Damn," she said, not knowing how to react. Where had it gone? Into air. But then it must have been an illusion, she realized. He put me in a hypnotic state and made me believe. I should have known it wasn't really true.A million stars burst into wheels of light, blistering, cold light, that drenched her. It came from behind and she felt the great weight of it crash into her. "Tony," she said, and fell into the waiting void. She thought nothing; she felt nothing. She saw only, saw the void as it absorbed her, waiting below and beneath her as she plummeted down the many miles.On her hands and knees she died. Alone on the porch. Still clutching for what did not exist.
— Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death
This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
— Nick Harkaway, Tigerman
He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren't nonsense, if there was some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke.
— Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza
He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he's not dead.
— Álvaro de Campos
Oh, how we could blossom if we didn't have to fight to the death to merely exist!
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
— Alastair Reynolds
Other times when I hear the wind blowI feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth being born.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
The Jetavana Temple bells ring the passing of all things. Twinned sala trees, white in full flower, declare the great man's certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end:They are as dust before the wind.
— Royall  Tyler, The Tale of the Heike
Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.
— Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
I’m in no hurry. What for?The sun and moon aren’t in a hurry: they’re right.Hurrying is believing people can get past their legs,Or that, jumping, they can land past their shadow.No; I don’t know how to hurry.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
My father once told methat there are no gods;only the cruel manipulationsof evil peoplewho pretended that their power was goodand their exploitation was love.But if there are no gods;why are we so hungry to believe in them?Just because evil liarsstand between us and the godsand block our view of themdoes not mean that the bright halothat surrounds each liaris not the outer edges of a god, waitingfor us to find our way around the lie.
— Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind
Conflict is a natural part of existence. Life is a struggle for survival for every organism at every level.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
I wonder if anyone will know what I mean when I say that some people make the world seem like a large place filled with different lands, languages and cultures and others make it seem like a small place where a new Tom Hanks movie is being released on video this week
— Tales of Mere Existence
A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
Hopeful visions touch possibilities that only exist in the gaze of the faithful.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Sameness of existence. Conformity is inevitable. So is search.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
No one is ever lost. No one needs to be saved. Open your inner eyes and see it all existing in harmony and love.
— Raphael Zernoff
Let your existence be enough for a moment.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Rest your mind for a moment in the peace of knowing you were created and you do exist.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite?For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for your own life, do you ever really exist at all?
— Maria Goodin, From the Kitchen of Half Truth
You don’t know what it’s like to be a man over thirty who’s never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening.
— Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
There are few things more powerful than a name. A single phrase that somehow becomes a symbol for an entire existence.
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Creation
Much of our existence is to deal with steep problems and slippery solutions
—  the rest is the celebration of life!
The bad stuff that is part and parcel of contrived social existence takes a back seat when you concentrate on the heart of Life itself.
— Valley Brown
IMPERCEPTIBLE IMPELLENTGod exists in the heart, not in the show of religious alignment
— Kamil Ali, Profound Vers-A-Tales
Together we'll make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn't so sure.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Life is always speaking to us at every moment.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Time Dreams. They are memories of the soul. They encompass all Time. They exist in the space of a dream.
— Tom  Stafford, Quexistence: The Quest for the Meaning of Existence: Time Dreams
What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for you own life, do you ever really exist at all?
— Maria Goodin, From the Kitchen of Half Truth
The God who is human in his divinity is the precise opposite of an essence which in ill-willed fashion closes itself to all human thought and knowledge... As love, rather, God is thinkable, without a distinction capable of made between essence and existence. Love is essentially existing lovingly.
— Eberhard Jüngel
It’s funny isn’t it? People claim to know what love is — yet the minute they’re given the opportunity to prove it — they bail.Because when I said love — I meant I bled for you. When the word love actually leaves my lips — I’m speaking it into existence. I’m empowering my soul — I’m joining with yours..
— Rachel Van Dyken, Toxic
The desideratum of the philosophy “better to have never been” is parents being charged with manslaughter for bringing children into the world
— Dean Cavanagh
The key to the scientist's purpose is the idea that every phenomenon is the product of a certain given set of condition. In his laboratory he hopes to reconstitute the set of conditions, however complex they may be, which, once they are fully reconstituted, cannot fail to give rise to the phenomenon he is after, life. In other words he seeks to start off a mechanically fated chain-reaction; and of course, in enumerating the conditions that have made it possible for him to manufacture his phenomenon he systematically discounts the huge mental toils, the plodding, methodical research, of himself and others.Thus, by a singular contradiction, he succeeds in convincing himself and, of course, attempts to persuade others, that he has arrived at the origin of his phenomenon; he sets out to demonstrate that everything in the universe runs perfectly smoothly by itself, without any creative power at anytime intruding.
— Gabriel Marcel
...To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, ‘I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;’ to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary,—this is the victory that overcometh the world.To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream;to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose;—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.‘I am weak,’ says the true soul, ‘but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep!
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Third Series
Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.
— Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad
Exit is a letter away from Exist.A part, just a space away from Apart.
— Noor Iskandar
Both precious and absurd, this tightrope of existence we walk in both directions; strung only on a rhythm of heartbeats across a void
— Dean Cavanagh
This instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
The people need poetry that will be their own secretTo keep them awake forever,And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.
— Osip Mandelstam
It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Maybe it’s time to set aside intellectualism and experience the wonders of things that can’t be explained.
— Jennifer Ott
The truth is that we are the embodiment of Life, we are born into this world as a result of a miracle, and later we are lost amidst the multitude of teachings and dogmas. After identifying with our beliefs and convinctions we forget who we really are, who the person born in us into the world in order to experience existence and get acquainted with all the teachings.
— Frank Wanderer
Ideas are seeds of existence in absolute emptiness.Creative words are the building blocks of such ideas.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
One of the misconceptions about atheism is that it somehow means someone denies the possibility of a deity. In all actuality, it simply means you don’t believe it to be the case — a point that should not be hard to understand with the complete lack of physical evidence that points to the existence of such a being or beings. Even if you’re 51 percent sure that there is no magical man in the sky, you are an atheist; and admitting that is the first half of the battle.
— David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I'm an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer
What is the future of men who havelost sight of the past?Earl Hollsopple lived on the edge of civilization in a deserted shack for nearly forty years. His life was one beautiful night of stargazing after another, until a helicopter flies overhead, and exposing his meager world. It is a sign; it is time for him to return to civilization.Unknowingly, Earl’s journey parallels another he had deeply repressed, and that is his return from the Vietnam War. The lone survivor of a plane crash, Earl waits for rescue that never came. He is left to find his way home alone.On both his quests, old Earl and young Earl learn lessons of survival, overcoming isolation and handling conflicts; his travels teach him not just about himself, but humankind. Reaching pivotal points in both journeys, Earl meets fateful loves, leading to destinies that are ultimately intertwined.Everything in life circles until we are able to answer the riddles that plaque man and humanity. Only until we take the journey, solve the problems of our own existence, do we find our way home.
— Jennifer Ott, Serendipidus
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
— Norman Mailer
Even in the saddest moments of life, the happiness of simply being, the joy of just having existence must be remembered strongly!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Why should anything exist at all, you might ask?Existence didn't just spring out of nothing whatsoever. Even if there was a time of No-Thingness, then there must have been an inherent or precursory realm of possibility; a possibility that something -- anything -- such as the imaginal, might exist.Why are we here at all? Because this was a possibility, and we are the living proof that there must have been such a possibility. So, you might say that existence, in one form or another, was even more than more likely, it was inevitable.
— Etienne de L'Amour
Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.
— Nikola Tesla
The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.
— Ingmar Bergman
The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking, live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard
The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark.
— Carl David Anderson
People and things would continue to exist in a world where I did not, and no one would ever think of me. And, if that was the case, then what was the point of existing in the first place?
— Lottie Moggach, Kiss Me First
It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Unni will come, if not today, then tomorrow. Today is nearly gone, but other todays stir fecund in the word tomorrow, many other todays when this one has lapsed from existence. And because I think of Unni, invoking his name in this for ever recurrent today, already he is here for me." - The Mountain is Young
— Han Suyin, The Mountain Is Young
Nothing Is Unusual (NIU).
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Art is the refreshing source of existence.
— Kristian Goldmund Aumann
He realized that time, clocks ticking, everything is just a human-made concept. That clocks didn’t tick back in the times he was seeing now, and he realized that the sun never sets as long as you travel with it, circumnavigating the globe, once every 24 hours. It was a new thought, a new dogma to Jordan, evolving his idea of being more than one at once. It was an idea of being more than one time at once, literally moving along the 4th dimension. Not being pushed to the side, not being pushed up or down, not being pushed inward or outward, but being pushed in one way, without ever moving at all. They were being pushed along the track of time, with no way to go back, with no way to retract and go back to the starting point as they could in any of the three visible dimensions. And it was that thought, Jordan finally realized, that made him exhausted and scared. It was that realization that made Jordan realize that this was the thing Tong was afraid of. That through all his travels on planes and all his moving around the world, he could still go back to Bangkok, he could still go back to the hospital where he was born, but he could never go backward on that track and stand in the same place, only the same location, as where his first day began."-A Spontaneous Existence, Chandler Ivanko
— Chandler Ivanko
We breathe in as existence, and breathe out as life. It is the heartbeat of the eternal moment.
— Franklin Gillette
We stare vacantly into our own future, frightened of all that time confiscates from us. We lament the theft of our beauty, youth, and loved-ones. And yet we somehow overlook the many ways in which we deprive ourselves: through anxiety and worry, we rob our hearts of peace and tranquility, as we sever the thin threads which tether us to the source of our creation.
— Shakieb Orgunwall
Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.
— Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse
When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I've made for myself that I don't follow--I see that I've done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.
— Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
People are ignorant of what any street clock knows. Why? Because the crack that cleaves existence also swallows their existence-reflecting consciousnesses. Thrown back into existence, the poor souls don't suspect that a moment ago they didn't exist - and only isolated things and persons, swallowed by the crack never to return to this world, arouse a certain fear and foreboding.
— Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse
The truth of existence was a happiness separated from the easy happy life. There was music in the forest. There was clean air where nobody could hear him breathe.
— Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness
And so the beauty was in being alone
—  but it was also the pain.
Everyting is as it should be. So am I.
— Cihan
I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion
—  I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.
The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
— Charles Ives
Your impact on others is the only proof of your existence
— Silje Akselberg Iversen
We sit together in the waiting room of one existence, waiting to be shuffled into the waiting room of the next. Not the existence of another lifetime, simply a different mindset, a different age, purpose, exile and a separate redemption. A separate world in which to wait.
— Leigh Hershkovich, Shattered Illusions