Existence Quotes
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No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
William Hazlitt
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He has,in short,reached his peak as a hunter,exuberantly altered from the pale,overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa's way of reducing every problem of existence to dire alternatives-shoot or starve,kill or be killed,shelter or suffer,procreate or count for nothing-has clarified his thinking,purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise.
Edmund Morris
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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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Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off.
William James
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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action-a perilous act.
Michel Foucault
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The acceptance of the gift of freedom transforms our perception of our social and political existence.
James Hal Cone
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University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.
Bruce Sterling
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There are as many ways of loving as there are people, and that wildflower variety is the great beauty of this dimension of existence.
Rumi
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Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have.
Spencer Wells
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For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.
Paul Auster
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Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?
Galway Kinnell
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Calmly spinning, I scan as far away as I can see. The last rays of the day's sun warm my back and my stare locks onto my own shadow. I follow the lines of my body on the stone in front of me, spreading my arms as wings, and bathe in the beauty of existence.
Dean Potter
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All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.
Alfred L. Kroeber
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I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does not mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects as things that are "real" is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.
T. M. Scanlon
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It is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
