Existence Quotes
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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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Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part?
Victor Hugo
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Do we fear suffering or apathy most? Is it from experience or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest flee?
Anna Katharine Green
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No one is discontented at not being a king except a discrowned king ... unhappiness almost invariably indicates the existence of a road not taken, a talent undeveloped, a self not recognized.
Blaise Pascal
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The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.
Napoleon Hill
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The science [geometry] is pursued for the sake of the knowledge of what eternally exists, and not of what comes for a moment into existence, and then perishes.
Plato
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We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.
Antonio Damasio
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This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.
David Benatar
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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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In coming closer to nature, man shows himself superior to it. As a mere part of nature, man's existence would be a series of isolated phenomena. All life would proceed from and depend on contact with the outside world.
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
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Man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a social animal.
Albert Einstein
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Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence. For example, infants who die from SIDs were actually great people when they were alive for real, so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile anyone Willard Scott ever congratulated for turning one hundred two was obviously a terrible individual who had many many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her own unknown purgatory even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world.
Chuck Klosterman
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Eternal life is personal existence in continuity with the present life, but transfigured.
Georgia Harkness
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The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.
Francis Bacon
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To deny the possibility, nay, the actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament, and the thing itself is a Truth to which every nation in the world hath, in its turn, borne testimony, by either example seemingly well attested or by prohibitory laws, which at least suppose the possibility of a commerce with evil spirits.
William Blackstone
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Under the ominous shadow which the second World War and its attendant circumstances have cast on the world, peace has become as essential to civilized existence as the air we breathe is to life itself.
Cordell Hull
