Existence Quotes
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Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.
Thomas Carlyle
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All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.
Virginia Woolf
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Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.
Keith Devlin
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Eternity is to us as time, the age to come, the continuation, the manifestation, and perfection of our present and true existence.
Adolph Saphir
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The sacrifice of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species.
Adolf Hitler
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There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.
Virginia Woolf
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Eternal life is personal existence in continuity with the present life, but transfigured.
Georgia Harkness
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As a Jew I am aware of how important the existence of Israel is for the survival of us all. And because I am proud of being Jewish, I am worried by the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the world.
Steven Spielberg
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The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
Sigmund Freud
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No business in the economy has the easy money that banks get to play with.... The existence of banks with single digit amounts of equity is a completely unhealthy existence - that is not only a risk for the banks, but for all of us.
Anat R. Admati
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The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.
William James
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A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.
Hannah Arendt
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Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.
Camille Flammarion
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Buddha emphasized and re-declared the eternal and unalterable existence of the moral government of this universe. He unhesitatingly said that the law was God Himself.
Mahatma Gandhi
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This is the bud of being, the dim dawn,
The twilight of our day, the vestibule;
Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death,
Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar,
This gross impediment of clay remove,
And make us embryos of existence free.
Edward Joseph Young
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Man's triumph will consist in substituting the struggle for existence by a struggle for mutual service.
Mahatma Gandhi
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We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person "to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion." Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against nonbelievers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.
Hugo Black
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It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.
David Benatar
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One man watches a river flow by. If he does not wish it to flow, to change ceaselessly in accord with its nature, he will suffer great pain. Another man understands that nature of the river is to change constantly, regardless of his likes and dislikes, and therefore he does not suffer. To know existence as this flow, empty of lasting pleasure, void of self, is to find that which is stable and free of suffering, to find true peace in the world.
Ajahn Chah
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Somehow, in many of those near-miss instances, I've managed to fight through and continue. But in all these situations, even when they're apparently going well, I feel I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.
Scott Stossel
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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
