Existence Quotes

People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.

Anton Chekhov

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

Quentin Crisp

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Henry Louis Mencken

The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions... Existence in itself is here to prove that it cannot be an evil.

Rabindranath Tagore

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Thomas Jefferson

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

Aristotle

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Erich Fromm

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

William James

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Updike, John

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Sontag, Susan

The fact of God is necessary for the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.

A.W. Tozer