Top 100 What Is Existence Quotes
#1. What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
Soren Kierkegaard
#2. The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma of the church. What is the use in a Pope if there is no Devil ?
H. P. Blavatsky
#3. The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#4. It is important to not be hostile to what a greater part of society has embraced, whether as Christians, Hindus or Muslims. It is important to respect that because whether you believe or not in the existence of a superior being, humanity does believe in that.
Nelson Mandela
#5. It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.
Thomas Heatherwick
#6. If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labour beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence.
Derrick Jensen
#7. 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
#8. Learn from what's behind you but look forward to what's ahead. It would be a sad, sad existence if you believed your best had already come and gone. Believe instead the truth ... that the best is yet to be because that part's up to you.
Toni Sorenson
#9. I would say a lot of the emotion in what I do is a sort of a thankfulness for those energies being around, because there's been points in my life when they weren't around, and it's a real sort of miserable existence.
John Frusciante
#10. It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development.
Noam Chomsky
#11. What makes Existence really nice Is Virtue
with a dash of Vice.
Harry Graham
#12. technics ... is the means through which man becomes a work of his own.... What is so frightening about technics is nothing more than the angst man feels before, and in, the exposure of his existence to the abyss of his lack of essence."6
Frances Dyson
#13. Things don't have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
Alberto Caeiro
#14. Thus all things are subject to death, sorrow and suffering. I became aware that I too was of the same nature, the nature of beginning and end. What if I searched for that which underlies all creation, that which is nirvana, the perfect freedom from unconditioned existence?
Gautama Buddha
#15. My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.
James Buchan
#16. We are just waves in time and space, changing continuously, and the illusion of individuality is produced through the concatenation of the rapidly succeeding phases of existence. What we define as likeness is merely the result of the symmetrical arrangement of molecules which compose our body.
Nikola Tesla
#17. That thing over there was more there than it's there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn't exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn't look very much,
Alberto Caeiro
#19. 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
#20. Self is what makes mind think, but never needs the mind.
Self is what makes bodies live, but needs no existence for itself.
Self can be realized; not by knowledge but by revelation.
Gian Kumar
#21. If the existence of human beings leads to nothing, what is all this comedy about?
Camille Flammarion
#22. To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other.
Alberto Manguel
#23. We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.
Parmenides
#24. Simply believing in the existence of God is not exactly what I would call a commitment. After all, even the devil believes that God exists. Believing has to change the way we live.
Mother Angelica
#25. Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.
Rajneesh
#26. Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of - stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper - won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What
Kevin Kelly
#27. The day when we shall know exactly what electricity is will chronicle an event probably greater, more important than any other recorded in the history of the human race. The time will come when the comfort, the very existence, perhaps, of man will depend upon that wonderful agent.
Nikola Tesla
#28. The technology [semiconductors] which has transformed practical existence is largely an application of what was discovered by these allegedly irresponsible [natural] philosophers.
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
#29. The world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It's far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.
David Bowie
#30. What is a lie? It is to say what is real is not real. It is to deny the existence of what exists.
Peter Nivio Zarlenga
#31. I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.
Richard Russo
#32. Media has changed the way we interact with one another and what we spend our time doing. Our social norms have changed.
The dangerous part of our social media and technologically saturated world is not its existence but what it distracts us from.
Jen Hatmaker
#33. True politeness is to social life what oil is to machinery, a thing to oil the ruts and grooves of existence. False politeness can shine without warming and glitter without vivifying.
Frances Harper
#34. Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#35. There is the globe,
The foundation of my bodily existence.
It wears me out with work and duties,
It gives me rest in old age,
It gives me peace in death.
For the on who supplied me with what I needed in life
Will also give me what I need in death.
Zhuangzi
#36. I love ... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.
Jake Busey
#37. The highest octave kundalini is the golden light which occurs in the supraconscious; it is the supraconscious. It's what they call Sat Chit Ananda - existence, consciousness, bliss ... full consciousness.
Frederick Lenz
#38. What are humans meant to do; why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring this question is a powerful exercise in meaning; what is the meaning of human existence?
David W. Earle
#39. The question, "What is the purpose thereof?" cannot be asked about anything which is not the product of an agent; therefore we cannot ask what is the purpose of the existence of God.
Maimonides
#40. In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.
Nicolas Bouvier
#41. What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.
Robert Musil
#42. Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.
Audre Lorde
#43. Laws are broken. Existence holds to no laws. Existence is what persists, and to persist is to struggle. In the end, the struggle fails.
Steven Erikson
#44. Heidegger's concept for the kind of being we ourselves are is Dasein. Literally it means 'being-there'.We are the sort of beings who are there, in the world. What characterizes Dasein is that its existence is a concern for it in its existence.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
#45. God's existence may not be proved, in the hard rationalist sense of the word. Yet it can be affirmed with complete sincerity that belief in God is eminently reasonable and makes more sense of what we see in the world, discern in history, and experience in our lives than its alternatives.
Alister E. McGrath
#46. 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
#47. What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?'
No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every men would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.
Emma Goldman
#48. There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?
But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a moment.
No wind whatsoever brought you now.
Now you're here.
What you were isn't you, or else the whole rose would be here.
Alberto Caeiro
#49. What we're seeking to do is become transparent. A transparent window on reality. But that takes time to do. We're starting with a very solid, objectified view of ourselves and existence
Frederick Lenz
#50. There is no door that leads to the meaning of existence, no window to enlightenment. If only we could enter life through the exit and live in reverse; then maybe we'd have a chance at understanding what the hell life is about.
Barbara Schoichet
#51. What I've learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously.
Tom Robbins
#52. 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
#53. When marriage is what it ought to be, it is indeed the very happiest condition of existence.
Fanny Kemble
#54. Death does not scare me, for when it takes me, my existence is over. What terrifies me is what I will become on my way to death.
Elora Mitchell
#55. [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
#56. The only existence I know now is the one I was given. An echo of what used to be.
Tahereh Mafi
#57. I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?
Soren Kierkegaard
#58. All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.
Albert Schweitzer
#59. In general, the heart seems to have a more reliable memory for what benefits the psyche than does the head, which has a rather unhealthy tendeny to lead an 'abstract' existence, and easily forgets that its consciousness is snuffed out the moment the heart fails its duty.
C. G. Jung
#60. What kind of believer are you? Do you believe IN God?. Or do you believe God? There is a major distinction. People who believe in God, simply acknowledge the existence of a Higher Power. People who believe God believe Him enough to do what He says.
Robert G. Allen
#61. What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles.
James P. Carse
#62. Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration ... tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis Bacon
#63. Thus, he says, those who would "eliminate from the universe" what they think of as "inferior beings" would simply "eliminate Providence itself," whose nature it is to "produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence.
Ken Wilber
#64. Look! Why want anything more marvellous than what is.
Diana Athill
#65. Gratitude is the appreciation of what is, of life, of existence, of anybody and anything, for just the way it is.
Adyashanti
#66. 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
#67. There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.
Terence McKenna
#68. The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet.
Jacques Maritain
#69. This world does not exist to you when you are missing.
Debasish Mridha
#71. So you believe in blood sucking fangers, but you don't believe in the existence of werewolves. What kind of narrow minded crap is that?
J.L. McCoy
#72. It might be judged an affront to your understanding should I go about to prove this first principle; the existence of a Diety and that He is the Creator of the universe, for that would suppose you ignorant of what all mankind in all ages have agreed in.
Benjamin Franklin
#73. If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.
Brad Warner
#74. Hearing this announcement, your soul will mobilize accordingly. It will mobilize ecstatically, in fact, because this is what your soul was born for. (Trust me, your soul has been waiting for you to wake up to your own existence for years.) But
Elizabeth Gilbert
#75. We must concern ourselves not with what is beyond life, or what is life, or what is the purpose of life, but rather with the understanding of this complex existence of everyday life, because that is the foundation upon which we must build.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#76. If we want to reduce poverty and misery, if we want to give to every deserving individual what is needed for a safe existence of an intelligent being, we want to provide more machinery, more power. Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies.
Nikola Tesla
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then - with great forgiveness and fortitude - dismissing them.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#81. Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time, comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.
John Stuart Blackie
#82. Let him! He is great but in his greatness he is no happier than we in our conflict! Goodness would not make evil; and what else hath he made? but let him sit on his vast solitary throne, creating worlds to make eternity less burthensome to his immense existence.
George Gordon Byron
#83. But how many chose to ignore the direct attack they laid on what is fed to all of us as 'life,' with its well-defined roads to factory and pool-hall, to work and pleasure, both organized, both shells, both a continuation of existence by forced means, in the shadow of life?
Tom McDonough
#84. 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
#85. Consciousness is a state of existence where subjects are aware of their surroundings and can respond to its demands according to internal and external perceptions.
Debasish Mridha
#86. There is a vast existence beyond what our eyes can see, and if we close our minds we limit our possibilities.
Leta B.
#87. ...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
#88. Get a little practice. See what it feels like to drive a knife through my heart. Relish it. Watch the light fade from my eyes, stare into my dying, taste it, see how you like it. There's a moment in death that is unlike anything else in all existence.
Karen Marie Moning
#89. 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
#90. We are learning to perceive existence in separate phases. One phase is to see that we are not our thoughts. As you sit, try and feel what is beyond thought - sense that you are separate from thought.
Frederick Lenz
#91. I think the most important quality in a birdwatcher is a willingness to stand quietly and see what comes. Our everyday lives obscure a truth about existence - that at the heart of everything there lies a stillness and a light.
Lynn Thomson
#92. Life is but a moment to moment heartbeat intertwined with the feelings of existence in a physical body. With each breathe we take we renew our commitment to stay in life. With each thought we think ... ... ... we decide what kind of life we will live.
L.G. Space
#93. 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
#94. Imagination is what providence uses to take men captive in actuality, in existence, in order to get them far enough out, or within, or down into existence. And when imagination has helped them get as far out as they should be - then actuality genuinely begins.
Soren Kierkegaard
#95. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera
#96. Passion is essential for a meaningful existence. Life is about what you feel.
Jonathan Cainer
#97. 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
#98. But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?
Molly Peacock
#99. The goal of all my work is essentially the same: demonstrating that magic is real or that reality is magic, by paying attention, and finding compensation or consolation for what is essentially a tragic existence.
Peter Blegvad
#100. Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.
Alvaro De Campos
