Existence Quotes - Page 34

• By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.

  Margaret Atwood

  Believe, Stories, Goes On

  FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Nov 19, 2016

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.

  Neil Gaiman

  Way, Facts, Bees

  4 Copy quote

• If we have a simple existence, we shall feel how happy and how fortunate we are. There are some people who are of the opinion that simplicity is almost tantamount to stupidity. But simplicity and stupidity are like the North Pole and the South Pole. One can be as simple as a child and, at the same time, one can have boundless knowledge, light and wisdom.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Children, Simple, Light

  4 Copy quote

• You can purify your existence by feeling deep within yourself a beautiful rose or lotus, or any other flower that you like. A flower is all purity. Try to identify yourself with the consciousness of the flower or with the purity of the flower. Today it is imagination, but if you continue imagining for five days, or ten days, or a month or two, then you are bound to see and feel the flower within you. First you may feel it, then you are bound to see the existence of the flower, and then automatically the fragrance and the purity of the flower will enter into you to purify you.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Beautiful, Flower, Two

  Sri Chinmoy (1997). “The Wings of Joy: Finding Your Path to Inner Peace”, p.191, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Distance, Heart, Nausea

  Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander (1964). “Nausea”, p.132, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• No price is too great to pay for inner peace. Peace is the harmonious control of life. It is vibrant with life-energy. It is a power that easily transcends all our worldly knowledge. Yet it is not separate from our earthly existence. If we open the right avenues within, this peace can be felt here and now.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Inner Peace, Energy, Pay

  Sri Chinmoy (2003). “Wisdom of Sri Chinmoy”, p.208, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

  Ivo Andric

  Ocean, Men, Knowing

  64 Copy quote

• Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Children, Struggle, Law

  "The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy".

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Your actions are your own. Your choices are your own. Each of us carries a burden of guilt for decisions made or not made. You can let that rule your whole life or you can put it behind you and move on. Only a madman lets jealousy determine the course of his existence. Only a weak man blames others for his own errors.

  Juliet Marillier

  Moving, Men, Weak Man

  9 Copy quote

• How seven days had passed since she had disappeared from existence. That it would take the eyes of the gods to find her. Or the heart of the Lumateran exile.

  Melina Marchetta

  Heart, Eye, Seven Days

  Melina Marchetta (2015). “The Complete Lumatere Chronicles”, p.874, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.

  Albert Einstein

  Book, Men, Two

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.439, Princeton University Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Adjustment? She called that an adjustment? How about I adjust her right out of existence?

  Kim Harrison

  Adjustment

  4 Copy quote

• Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.

  Aberjhani

  Nature, Fear, Humanity

  7 Copy quote

• I am not questioning your honor, I am denying its existence.

  George R. R. Martin

  Honor, Questioning, Tyrion

  7 Copy quote

• I've determined the ideal job for me is one where I can write clever essays about my life and my employer will give me enough money not only to live a comfortable existence, but also to buy many, many new pairs of shoes.

  Jen Lancaster

  Jobs, Clever, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• [A] woman should have every honorable motive to exertion which is enjoyed by man, to the full extent of her capacities and endowments. The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.

  Frederick Douglass

  Spiritual, Men, Air

  Frederick Douglass (2011). “In the Words of Frederick Douglass: Quotations from Liberty’s Champion”, p.237, Cornell University Press

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• Based on the law of probability Everything is possible because The sheer existence of possibility Confirms the existence Of impossibility.

  Dejan Stojanovic

  Law, Possibility, Probability

  "Understanding". Poem by Dejan Stojanovic,

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

  Thomas Hardy

  Passion, Structure, Passing

  Thomas Hardy (2016). “Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Diversion Classics)”, p.113, Diversion Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.

  John Keats

  Real, Past, Feelings

  "Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats".

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing lasts forever. That's the tragedy and the miracle of existence - that everything is impermanent. Everything changes. All we can do is make the best of the time we have. And go down shooting, naturally.

  Mira Grant

  Miracle, Forever, Tragedy

  6 Copy quote

• ...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Art, Men, Expression

  "Sculpting in Time" by Andrei Tarkovsky, (p. 192), 1986.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence. Good artists often get stuck there. Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.

  Martha Beck

  Healing, Artist, Darkness

  Martha Beck (2012). “Finding Your Way In A Wild New World: Four steps to fulfilling your true calling”, p.150, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

  Jacques Lacan

  Lying, Desire, Rooms

  Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller (1988). “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955”, p.223, CUP Archive

  115 Copy quote

  Show source

• Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain. She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.

  Thomas Hardy

  Pain, Grief, Passion

  Thomas Hardy (2008). “Tess of the d'Urbervilles”, p.103, OUP Oxford

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.

  Sylvia Plath

  Sea, Matter, Realizing

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.18, Anchor

  6 Copy quote

  Show source