Existence Quotes
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It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet.
Vladimir Putin
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Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?
Abraham Lincoln
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Every discussion of the status of woman is complicated by the existence of the lady. She overshadows the rest of her sex.
Emily James Smith Putnam
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The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the purpose of historians to say, 'No! It's very complicated.'
The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.
David Cannadine
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I was in my house, alone in the living room, anxious about you, watching the flashes of lightning. And a flash of lightning lit up this truth for me, right in front of my eye. That night i lost you, I lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person.
Haruki Murakami
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Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
Norman Mailer
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The whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. ... The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of an unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world.
Ernst Haeckel
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A man’s life, Choje taught his monks, did not move in a linear progression, with each day an equal chit on the calendar of existence. Rather it moved from defining moment to defining moment, marked by the decisions that roiled the soul.
Eliot Pattison
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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
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No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
Michel Foucault
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It is not possible to conceive a democratic Guatemala, free and independent, without the indigenous identity shaping its character into all aspects of national existence.
Rigoberta Menchu
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Into what boundless life, does education admit us. Every truth gained through it expands a moment of time into illimitable being--positively enlarges our existence, and endows us with qualities which time cannot weaken or destroy.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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Take a look around, then, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening. Now by the uninitiated I mean the people who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their hands, and who will not allow that action or generation or anything invisible can have real existence.
Plato
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She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.
Marcel Proust
