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“Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Easily mistaken, it is not about a love for adversity, it is about knowing a strength and a faith so great that adversity, in all its adverse manifestations, hardly even exists.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

“What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so--I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already, I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry

“Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size, their ability to spout fire, or to crack boulders into splinters with their massive talons. In fact, the only terrifying quality that dragons do not possess is that of existence.

Now, the people of this land know about dragons because their leaders have warned them about them. They tell stories about cruel dragons with razor teeth and fiery breath. They recount legends of dragons hunting by night on silent wings. In short, the leaders make sure that the people believe in all the qualities of dragons, including that key quality of existence. And then they control the people �� when they need to �� with their fear of dragons. The people pay a dragon-slaying tax �� everyone stays indoors after dark to avoid being snatched by swooping claws �� and nobody ever strays out of bounds for fear of being eaten well and truly up.

Perhaps somebody will wonder if dragons aren’t, after all, fictitious because �� despite their size �� nobody seems to have actually seen one. And so it is necessary from time to time to provide evidence: a burnt tree or two, a splintered rock, the mysterious absence of a villager. The population is controlled by the dragons in its collective mind. It’s contrived superstition, and it is possible because the people do not know enough about the way the world works to know that dragons do not exist.”
― David Whiteland, Book of Pages

“They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs

“I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Based on the law of probability
Everything is possible because
The sheer existence of possibility
Confirms the existence
Of impossibility.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“I don’t always feel what I know I should feel.
My thought crosses the river I swim very slowly
Because the suit men made it wear weighs it down.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“How had they met? By chance, like everybody else. What were there names? What's it to you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does anyone really know where they're going?”
― Denis Diderot

“If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“The presence of ghosts is only as close as your belief.
The existence of aliens is only as far as your rejection.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Whatever begins to exist has a cause.”
― Glenn Meade, The Second Messiah

“...I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.”
― Linus Pauling

“Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of the convulsive chemistry of union and repellency. We are born with a desire to be immortal. Cursed with the knowledge that we must die, people live their orthodox lives out by displaying reckless abandon as to the outcome of human life or nervously hounded by utter despondency nipping their heels. How we resolve this decidedly human complex of carrying out our daily lives while burden by our inescapable mortality determines our essential character. The collation of similar values adopted by our community determines who we are as a people.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster

“It is natural that people should differ most, and most violently, about the unknowable . . . There is all the room in the world for divergence of opinion about something that, so far as we can realistically perceive, does not exist.”
― E. Haldeman-Julius

“There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?
But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a moment.
No wind whatsoever brought you now.
Now you’re here.
What you were isn’t you, or else the whole rose would be here.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

“People are born on this planet with no choice at all
And have to spend most of their life working to pay it off.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

“Por lo general, sólo se mantenían vivos aquellos prisioneros que tras varios años de dar tumbos de campo en campo, habían perdido todos sus escrúpulos en la lucha por la existencia; los que estaban dispuestos a recurrir a cualquier medio, fuera honrado o de otro tipo, incluidos la fuerza bruta, el robo la traición o lo que fuera con tal de salvarse. Los que hemos vuelto de allí, gracias a multitud de casualidades fortuitas o milagros -como cada cual prefiera llamarlos- lo sabemos bien: los mejores de entre nosotros no regresaron.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“All beings exist and nothing else
And that’s why they’re called beings”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn’t exist,
That there are hills, valleys, plains,
That there are trees, flowers, weeds,
That there are rivers and stones,
But there is not a whole these belong to,
That a real and true wholeness
Is a sickness of our ideas.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“Yes: I exist inside my body.
I’m not carrying the sun and the moon in my pocket.
I don’t want to conquer worlds because I slept badly,
And I don’t want to eat the world for breakfast because I have a stomach.
Indifferent?
No: a son of the earth, who, if he jumps, it’s wrong,
A moment in the air that’s not for us,
And only happy when his feet hit the ground again,
Pow! In reality where nothing’s missing!

(6/20/1919)”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

“A job shouldn’t be a mean of existence but rather, a means of sustenance”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.”
― Jean Baptiste Perrin

“he woman Caeiro fell in love with. I have no idea who she was, and I intend to never find out, not even out of curiosity. There are things of which the soul refuses to lose its ignorance.

I’m perfectly aware no one’s obliged to reciprocate love, and great poets have nothing to do with being great lovers. But there’s a transcendent spite...

Let her remain anonymous even to God!”
― Álvaro de Campos

“Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet