Quotes About Human Existence

#1. 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

#2. The point of Jesus' existence wasn't to lessen or diminish our appreciation of each other, but to expand our appreciation of each other by reminding us what lies within all of us, because Jesus was an example of the pinnacle of human evolution.

Marianne Williamson

#3. The human psyche shows that each individual is an extension of all of existence.

Stanislav Grof

#4. Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.

Marcel Proust

#5. Stories
individual stories, family stories, national stories
are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Yann Martel

#6. John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.

Lorrie Moore

#7. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Ayn Rand

#8. 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

#9. Awareness is the main dilemma of human existence. I looked upon the professors as sages who had all the answers and upon the university as the temple of knowledge. How could an insane person like her

Eckhart Tolle

#10. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

Joseph Conrad

#11. The conservation of nature, the proper care for the human environment and a general concern for the long-term future of the whole of our planet are absolutely vital if future generations are to have a chance to enjoy their existence on this earth

Prince Philip

#12. During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well

Walter Benjamin

#13. It is crucial that we realize the great value of human existence, the opportunity and the potential that our brief lives afford us. It is only as humans that we have the possibility of implementing changes in our lives.

Dalai Lama

#14. I am committed to my art. I believe that all art has as its ultimate goal the union between the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. I believe that to be the reason for the very existence of art.

Michael Jackson

#15. My name is Spar. I am neither called Rocky nor made of rock. I am a Guardian, one of those warriors who were summoned to battle against the Seven demons of the Darkness and to prevent their possible return to this human plane of existence. I consider the others of my kind to be my brothers.

Christine Warren

#16. Prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.

Henri Nouwen

#17. But as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Heidi Julavits

#18. Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?

Mo Yan

#19. All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

Haniel Long

#20. The thing about Mumbai is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. It's an incredible cavalcade of life, and I love that.

Julian Sands

#21. Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.

Jose Saramago

#22. The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity's place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales.

Jill Tarter

#23. I foresaw the financial crisis. I get messages in my sleep, in pictures and words. I understood that I have a mission and a role in ensuring human existence. I received a message that people would soon start to go crazy.

Shari Arison

#24. For those who were born lovers, falling in love is not neither an option nor a decision. it is a matter of existence.

Sameh Elsayed

#25. How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

Yann Martel

#26. I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#27. I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game's rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence.

Konrad Lorenz

#28. The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#29. Only photography has been able to divide human life
into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence.

Eadweard Muybridge

#30. The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.

Thomas Berry

#31. How the human system is happening, in the same way the universe has happened. In the same way that the micro is happening, that is how the macro has happened. If you look at the micro and perceive it, you will also know existence.

Jaggi Vasudev

#32. The Bhagavad Gita deals essentially with the spiritual foundation of human existence. It is a call of action to meet the obligations and duties of life; yet keeping in view the spiritual nature and grander purpose of the universe.

Jawaharlal Nehru

#33. They were famous for having bad tempers, but then again, if you sprang into existence to discover that your Creators were human assholes, you'd be pissed off, too.

Matthew Mather

#34. Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.

Norman Cousins

#35. For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise it's foolishness... ultimately it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence.

George Clayton Johnson

#36. Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

Rollo May

#37. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Milan Kundera

#38. Spirituality is the intersection of three paths: letting go of ego, an unconditional yes to the conditions of human existence, and an immeasurable compassion.

David Richo

#39. The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings. It is the human spirit, and the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him. It is the spiritual plane of our natural existence, the place of truth before God, from where alone our whole lives can become eternal.

Dallas Willard

#40. Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#41. I am intrigued by the basics of human life, by our vulnerability, our desires, our sexuality - as far as I am concerned, character is expressed through sexuality. Art is able to represent human existence stripped to its essence by showing us the naked human body.

Thomas Koerfer

#42. [H]e had this view of things - that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous.

David Guterson

#43. There is more to human existence and to reality itself than current science can ever give us access to.

Dalai Lama XIV

#44. WOMEN must be at the forefront of nation-building to bring the South African citizenry together and, therefore, develop a whole new ethos of human co-existence

Steven Biko

#45. Nothing has ever been out of place in this existence. Things have been out of place in human societies.

Jaggi Vasudev

#46. Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society ... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.

Stephen Harper

#47. Faith is not limited to affirming the existence of God. No, faith tells us that God loves us and demands a loving response. This response is given through love for human beings, and that is what we mean by a commitment to God and to our neighbor.

Gustavo Gutierrez

#48. Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Jonathan Franzen

#49. The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence-and eventually falling through that hole ourselves.

Van Jones

#50. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable

Albert Camus

#51. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business. Yet we have no other world to live in. And

Matt Haig

#52. Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience.
And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#53. The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light ... It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.

Marilynne Robinson

#54. Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

Irvin D. Yalom

#55. I don't think fear necessarily is a core human emotion, but I do think fear of death is something that is at the core of every person's existence.

Zachary Cole Smith

#56. It often seems ... the human race has twittered away its existence singing an endless song - a song of waste and hatred, where there should be progress and love.

Oscar Arias

#57. ...what exactly is there in human existence that can lure you away from pleasure: peace of mind, a walk by the sea, moderation?

Kapka Kassabova

#58. Modern science has its value in terms of utility, but it cannot open up existence to human experience.

Jaggi Vasudev

#59. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

Noam Chomsky

#60. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

#61. One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

Aldous Huxley

#62. The greatest failure in human existence is the failure of Christ-followers to "love one another earnestly from a pure heart"5 and to heed the words of Christ: "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."6

James MacDonald

#63. If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful, and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed.

Pope Benedict XVI

#64. To me, human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two-dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say.

Ornette Coleman

#65. I guess what I get excited about when I'm thinking about projects is that toothy, complex area of goodness and badness and the gray areas of human behavior and existence.

Liz Garbus

#66. People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

George Orwell

#67. Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development.

Wilhelm Reich

#68. For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the absolutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to human existence but its difference as well.

James P. Carse

#69. Every human being has a fascinating existence, with a big cast of good and evil characters in each. And almost always, somewhere along the way, magic.

Lucinda Riley

#70. Everything that we perceive around us is struggling towards freedom, from the atom to the man, from the insentient, lifeless particle of matter to the highest existence on earth, the human soul. The whole universe is in fact the result of this struggle for freedom.

Swami Vivekananda

#71. The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.

Keith Haring

#72. Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly forsee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.

George Washington

#73. Giving and receiving love is vital to human existence. It is the glue that binds couples, families, communities, cultures, and nations.

G. Frank Lawlis

#74. If the existence of human beings leads to nothing, what is all this comedy about?

Camille Flammarion

#75. A great and frequent error in our judgment of human nature is to suppose that those sentiments and feelings have no existence, which may be only for a time concealed. The precious metals are not found at the surface of the earth, except in sandy places.

Arthur Helps

#76. Buildings are 'humane' only when they promote peaceful human co-existence.

Frei Otto

#77. I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions - and should be vigorously opposed.

Steve Allen

#78. From a clear knowledge of the Bhagavad-gita all the goals of human existence become fulfilled. Bhagavad-gita is the manifest quintessence of all the teachings of the Vedic scriptures.

Adi Shankara

#79. Human life without a relationship with God is simply a mere existence.

Sunday Adelaja

#80. The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists - for us, not mice or wasps - because we go on believing in it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#81. There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#82. 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

#83. For the secret of human existence lies not only in living, but in knowing what to live for.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#84. At every stage, addiction is driven by one of the most powerful, mysterious, and vital forces of human existence. What drives addiction is longing
a longing not just of brain, belly, or loins but finally of the heart.

Cornelius Plantinga

#85. In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

Erik Erikson

#86. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

C. G. Jung

#87. The existence of symmetry laws is in full accordance with our daily experience. The simplest of these symmetries, the isotropy and homogeneity of space, are concepts that date back to the early history of human thought.

Chen-Ning Yang

#88. Every human feeling is greater and larger than its exciting cause-a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#89. Nowists are more likely to experience joy because they embrace the uncertainty of existence. They are switched on by the uncertain stuff of human life and come alive when faced with life at its most uncontrollable.

Max McKeown

#90. Gratitude is one of the chief graces of human existence and is crowned in heaven with a consciousness of unity.

Ernest Holmes

#91. What is it about the human face that it should be the most memorable thing in existence and yet its atoms are the quickest to disperse?

Marius Kociejowski

#92. The individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.

Albert Einstein

#93. We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

Virginia Woolf

#94. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.

Sam Harris

#95. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

Ayn Rand

#96. For those that don't know, a human is a real bipedal life form of midrange intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small, waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.

Matt Haig

#97. Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You are perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs or tribulations can ever change that.

Saint Frances De Sales

#98. Scientists or thinkers who try to discover the truth cannot find that higher life by thinking alone, but their own life, spent in search for the truth and neglecting the physical living, is just that higher form of human existence.

Alija Izetbegovic

#99. The savings bank of human existence is the weekly Sabbath.

William Blaikie

#100. Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements

Edith Wharton