Existence Quotes - Page 17

• Envy, envy eats them alive. If you had money, they’d envy you that. But since you don’t, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren’t happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.

  Dean Koontz

  Daughter, Men, People

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• Sometimes, life seems to have a higher meaning. Events unfold in uncanny sequences. Long-forgotten acquaintances turn up with news that changes lives. A stranger appears and speaks a few words of wisdom, solving a previously insoluble problem, or something in a recent dream transpires in reality. Suddenly the existence of God seems confirmed.

  Dean Koontz

  Dream, Life Changing, Reality

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• I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.

  Anne Lamott

  Son, Earth, Remember

  Anne Lamott (2008). “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”, p.139, Penguin

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• Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.

  Paul Auster

  New York, Home, Together

  Paul Auster (2008). “The Brooklyn Follies”, p.68, Faber & Faber

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• The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Community

  "Heretics". Chapter XIV: "On Certain Modern Writers and the Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Institution of the Family", 1905.

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• Of all treasures of knowledge, the most vital is the knowledge of God, his existence, powers, love, and promises.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Promise, Treasure, Knowledge Of God

  Spencer W. Kimball (1982). “The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, Twelfth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

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• Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

  Simone Weil

  Danger, Trembling, Exposed

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.13, Psychology Press

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origins notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. this is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition.

  Hannah Arendt

  Character, Men, Self

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• This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.

  Cormac McCarthy

  War, Games, Unity

  Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.263, Pan Macmillan

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