Existence Quotes - Page 27

• Long since, the desert wind wiped away our footprints in the sand. But at every second of my existence, I remember what happened, and you still walk in my dreams and in my reality. Thank you for having crossed my path.

  Paulo Coelho

  Dream, Reality, Wind

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• A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.

  W. H. Auden

  Silly, Book, Passion

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• It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

  Thomas Ligotti

  Nonsense, Outrageous

  Thomas Ligotti (2009). “Teatro Grottesco”, p.53, Random House

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• I am a Stormdancer! Mere metal is nothing compared with the power of a storm." Kade made his voice boom and spread his arms wide. His eyes sparked with humor. "I. Am. Invincible." "Until a happy wind blows," I said. "Curse those sunny days." "The bane of your existence." "The scourge of society." "The downfall of decency." "And boring, too. Nothing like a good gale to put a spring in your step." Kade grinned.

  Maria V. Snyder

  Spring, Eye, Blow

  Maria V. Snyder (2013). “Storm Glass”, p.83, Harlequin

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• With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.

  Carl Jung

  Art, Eye, Light

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• There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

  George Eliot

  Peace, Morning, Pain

  "Felix Holt, the Radical". Book by George Eliot. Introductory chapter, 1866.

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• Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.

  Samuel Beckett

  Lightning, Guarantees, Dull

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• When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Men, Relief, Lasts

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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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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• One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Memories, Paradise, Habit

  Baltasar Gracian (2006). “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”, p.106, Shambhala Publications

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• The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.

  Sigmund Freud

  Doe, Purpose, Links

  Sigmund Freud (2008). “General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology”, p.46, Simon and Schuster

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• To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.

  Chris Rose

  Meaningful, New Orleans, Cities

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• I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence.

  Douglas Adams

  Function, My Own

  Douglas Adams (2010). “The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.555, Del Rey

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• Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

  Glen Duncan

  Coffee, Aroma, Justify

  Glen Duncan (2007). “I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story”, p.92, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.' 'They kill themselves, you mean?' said Bod. [...] 'Indeed.' 'Does it work? Are they happier dead?' 'Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

  Neil Gaiman

  Believe, Mean, Somewhere Else

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• The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

  Aldous Huxley

  Distance, Eye, Order

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

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• All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Reflection, Self, Ideas

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Baldwin (2004). “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings”, p.170, Psychology Press

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• This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along.

  Hillary Jordan

  Yawning, Emptiness, Rage

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• What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Men, Twenties, Laughed

  Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “The Wisdom of Kierkegaard”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

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• There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.

  Charles Dickens

  Men, Littles, Hats

  1836-7 Pickwick Papers, ch.4.

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• It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

  Carl Jung

  Thinking, Differences, People

  Carl Gustav Jung, Gerhard Adler (1976). “The Collected Works of C. G. Jung”, Bollingen

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• Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Desire, Enough

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2010). “Crime And Punishment (Vintage Classic Russians Series)”, p.544, Random House

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• Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.... To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Good Life, Hate, Real

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.445, OUP Oxford

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• Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence. On the contrary, everyone was grumpy, complaining. Naturally, if everything surrounding your life from the very beginning goes on pointing out to you that you are not what you should be, goes on giving you great ideals that you have to follow and you have to become, your isness is never praised. What is praised is your future - if you can become someone respectable, powerful, rich, intellectual, in some way famous, not just a nobody.

  Rajneesh

  Spiritual, Powerful, Giving

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• Well, you split your soul, you see, and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one’s body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged. But of course, existence in such a form . . .

  J. K. Rowling

  Soul, Body, Splits

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