Existence Quotes
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Technological revolutions are very hard to predict. My favourite example is someone in 1850 taking care of horses as a farrier. They would have said, "Look, horses have been part of human existence for 5,000 years. We are horse people. It's permanent." But all of a sudden, the internal combustion engine comes along and, with it, oil fields and automobiles, which basically replace the horse completely. So we often have these long periods of stability and then a sudden inflection point.
Reed Hastings
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And now in one hour's time I'll be out there again. I'll raise my eyes and look down that corridor four feet wide with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.
Colin Welland
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Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.
Colin Farrell
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For I never have seen, and never shall see, that the cessation of the evidence of existence is necessarily evidence of the cessation of existence.
William De Morgan
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In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, everyone who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find the enviable existence.
John Stuart Mill
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We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.
Ann Druyan
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The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
Simone de Beauvoir
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On my view there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.
David Benatar
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No new creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of chemical agency. We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen.
John Dalton
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In a letter from Bath to her sister, Cassandra, one senses her frustration at her sheltered existence, Tuesday, 12 May 1801. Another stupid party . . . with six people to look on, and talk nonsense to each other.
Jane Austen
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Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
Hermann Hesse
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Be patient, calm, compassionate. Know that existence is fleeting.
Ettore Sottsass
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The whole existence of man is a ceaseless duel between the forces of life and death.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.
Ravi Zacharias
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Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
William James
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Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation “RIP” (“Rest in Peace”).
Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes:
“I was not; I was; I am not; I care not.”
The meaning is clear.
There was no existence before birth.
A person existed only after being born.
After death there once more was no existence.
Bart Ehrman
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Consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all existence.
Amit Goswami
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. . . the integral being is attached to nothing and can relate to everyone with an unstructured attitude. Because of this, her very existence benefits all things.
Lao Tzu
