Existence Quotes
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One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ('a world of identical cases') as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:-we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the referendum in Quebec, the very existence of Canada was on the line... I had a responsibility to ensure that Canada never again came close to the precipice.
Jean Chretien
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The complete self-absorption, and childish indulgence and disregard, and having to feel as though everything you're doing is so people can live vicariously through you, so you have to pursue more and more unpleasant pastimes in order to satisfy the armchair people. That's a kind of scary existence.
Emily Haines
Broken Social Scene
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Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.
Norman Cousins
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Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side.
Elizabeth Goudge
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God is the efficient cause not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence.
Corr. Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.
Baruch Spinoza
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
Emil Cioran
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It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Immortal beings have been compared to stars, these are existences that linger on long after the death of the thing itself.
Zeena Schreck
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In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them.
John Stuart Mill
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But a problem occurs about nothing. For that from which something is made is a cause of the thing made from it; and, necessarily,every cause contributes some assistance to the effect's existence.
Anselm of Canterbury
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The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you ca not be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed int he woods like timid deer!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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The tendency of life is not the preservation of the species, but solely the preservation of each individual organism, as long as it is in existence at all, and is able to carry on its life processes.
Boris Sidis
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For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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That there is a Devil is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil. For any to deny the being of a Devil must be from ignorance or profaneness worse than diabolical.
Cotton Mather
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Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’ . There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger eastern nation [Russia]. Besides, those who remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have been killed.
Adolf Hitler
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[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?
Diogenes
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In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan
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If people insist that honor is dearer than life itself, what they really mean is that existence and well-being are as nothing compared with other people's opinions. Of course, this may be only an exaggerated way of stating the prosaic truth that reputation, that is, the opinion others have of us, is indispensable if we are to make any progress in the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
