Best existence & self Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.”

Humans Art Self Evil Answers Existence Art Is Claims Bounds Backgrounds Secular Human Existence

Author:Yann Martel

“Love is self-realization. Love is liberation. The only way beyond time, to unravel the knot of existence, is to love.”

Way Self Happiness Love Is Existence Buddhism Self Realization Realization Liberation Knots

Author:Frederick Lenz

“The self plays among the waves of existence. It surfaces, it comes up for a while, and then it disappears again.”

Self Play Existence Wave Come Up Surface Disappear Hinduism

Author:Frederick Lenz

“My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.”

World Soul Self Whole Feelings Fall My Own Existence Cases Elements Circles Whole World Sensations Surround Peculiar Spheres My Thoughts Opaque

Author:F. H. Bradley

“The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

Men Self Country Lasts White Existence Protect Mere Instinct South Empires Southern Preservation White Man Self Preservation Sprung Ku Klux Klan

Author:Woodrow Wilson

“Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.”

Humans Self Dies Grows Existence Forever Awareness Self Awareness Wounds Supreme Treasure Mortality Diminish

Book:Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

Source: Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love.”

“We pass through hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of existences. In each lifetime, we're exploring another part of our own self, which is eternity.”

Self Existence Millions Eternity Lifetime Reincarnation Exploring

Author:Frederick Lenz

“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.”

Source: Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer

“Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.”

Source: Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer

“The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.”

Self Individual Existence Society Offers Advantage Ideals West Population Frustration Substitutes Plague Advancement Soothing Anonymity

Book:THE TRUE BELIEVER

Source: THE TRUE BELIEVER

“Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully--wild, generous, drastic--in an unrationed profligacy of self ... And in that split second when you understand that you finally are about to die-to uncreate the world no time to do it over no more chances--that instant when you realize your conscious existence is truly flaring nova, won't you want to have used up all-all-the splendor that you are?”

World Want Self Life Is Used Dies Realizing Chance Existence Conscious Generous Instant Splits Splendor Drastic Novas

Author:Robin Morgan

“Our primordial purpose is to respond to the impulsion from within to solve the mystery of our individual existence, to find and be the authentic Self that is, has been and ever shall be.”

Has Beens Self Purpose Individual Existence Mystery Solve Authentic Self

Author:Michael Beckwith

“The visual arts must communicate to the human spirit, forcing individuals to reflect on themselves and their existence beyond their own self-interest.”

Humans Art Self Spirit Individual Interest Existence Communicate Visuals Human Spirit Self Interest Visual Art

Author:Dean Mitchell

“To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress.”

“To become conscious of God, to become God's consciousness, to become God, to be God and to be beyond God, God being beyond God, God having an existence separate from the creation, to be that, to merge with that, to lose one's self and find one's self endlessly again and again in that is self-realization.”

Self God Loses Existence Consciousness Creation Conscious Self Realization Realization Again And Again

Author:Frederick Lenz

“We examine everything in existence and we come to see that everything is transitory and temporal, that which is left over is God, is eternity, is the Self.”

Self Left Existence Yoga Eternity Transitory

Author:Frederick Lenz

“In that undifferentiated reality of the Self there is eternal bliss. All the phantoms of existence fade away.”

Self Reality Existence Eternal Yoga Bliss Fades Phantoms Fade Away

Author:Frederick Lenz

“There are persons who elected to give their existence to God. They are happy, happy in their self-giving.”

Giving Persons Self Existence Yoga Karma Karma Yoga Self Giving

Author:Frederick Lenz

“Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.”

Self Existence Mankind Self Esteem Planets Esteem Biology Consent Geology

Book:One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation

Source: One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation

“I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.”

Men Humans Self States Facts Culture Existence Conditions Civilization Ideals Tradition Active Factors Cosmos Ecology Find Me Demonstration Constellations

Book:The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir

Source: The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir

“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.”

Ifs Knows Men World Doe Self Pain Suffering Wish Pleasure Existence Watches Flow Rivers Empty Likes Lasting One Man Dislike Void Stable Another Man Accord True Peace Likes And Dislikes

Author:Ajahn Chah

“Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.”

Knows Men Self Individual Existence Conflict Solutions Essence Species Genuine Communism Resolution Affirmation Riddle Antagonism Objectification Man And Nature Self Affirmation

Book:Marx: Selected Writings

Source: Marx: Selected Writings

“There is a fundamental difference between the Jewish idea of creation and that of Islam. The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine will.”

“The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love--that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another.”

Years Firsts Long Self Moving Joy Mother Term Love Is Animal Existence Delight Range Sensibility Expansion Absorbing Suppression Mother's Love

Book:Felix Holt: The Radical

Source: Felix Holt: The Radical

“Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.”

Men Looks Doe Made Real Self Purpose Social Existence Needed Promise Perfection Paid Salvation Deny Contracts Procedures Bourgeois Selected Basements Real Self Social Contract

Book:Closing of the American Mind

Source: Closing of the American Mind

“Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.”

“Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.”

Thinking Men May Self Motivation Fall Space Existence Perception Standards Regard Supreme Traps Equations Time And Space Inclination Self Centered Axioms Expediency

Author:Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there, but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot call forth that submission to something superior to the self which characterizes the appearance of any rule.”

Self Games Individual Common Existence Appearance Superiors Submission Rite Regularity Schemas

Book:The Moral Judgement of the Child

Source: The Moral Judgement of the Child

“The happiness of God-realization is self-sustained, eternally fresh and unfailing, boundless and indescribable. And it is for this happiness that the world has sprung into existence.”

World Self Existence Realization Boundless Indescribable Sprung

Book:The Secret of Sleep: The Mystery of Man's Relation with God

Source: The Secret of Sleep: The Mystery of Man's Relation with God

“Existence is self-enjoyment, by means of some object distinct from ourselves.”

Mean Self Existence Objects Enjoyment

Author:Johann Kaspar Lavater

“The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.”

Art Stills Self Law Common Existence Special Areas Works Of Art Enchantment Profane

Book:Dialectic of Enlightenment

Source: Dialectic of Enlightenment

“Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.”

“Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”

Humans Self Understanding Existence Consciousness Core Satisfied Human Existence

Book:Signs

Source: Signs

“Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.”

World Should Wells Kind Self Certain Existence Consciousness Strange Perspective Please Following Deny Destroyed Explanation Rivals Identifying Existence Of God

Author:Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.”

Self States Law Interest Natural Existence Modern Morality Foundation Prepared Appeals Preservation Ideological Natural Law Self Preservation

Book:Diary of a Bad Year

Source: Diary of a Bad Year

“Even the Atheists... readily acknowledge it for an indubitable truth, that there must be something... which was never made or produced - and which therefore is the cause of those other things that are made, something... whose existence must needs be necessary... Wherefore all the question now is, what is this... self-existent thing, which is the cause of all other things that are made.”

Needs Made Self Causes Existence Atheism Atheist Acknowledge

Author:Ralph Cudworth

“Anxiety may consist of the loss of psychological or spiritual meaning which is identified with one's existence as a self, i.e., the threat of meaninglessness.”

May Self Wisdom Spiritual Loss Existence Anxiety Threat Psychological Meaninglessness

Author:Paul Tillich

“It is the profoundest of cosmic ironies. The divine power, our true spiritual essence, does not achieve perfection until it hits the 'rock' bottom of the cosmos - the dense and crude earth. It remains imperfect until the moment of entombment for the simple reason that until that dark nadir is reached the experiential adventure of existence remains incomplete, and Self is not yet endowed with the entire spectrum of the light of consciousness - from spirit to matter - from the highest high to the lowest low.”

Source: The New Hermetics: 21st Century Magick for Illumination and Power

“You need to search your awareness and consider the limitless possibilities of existence in all things and not be so narrow-minded in your self-discovery.”

Needs Self Existence Awareness Possibility Buddhism Discovery All Things Self Discovery Buddhist Limitless Etiquette Narrow-minded Limitless Possibilities

Author:Frederick Lenz

“The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is.”

Humans Art Ends Self Philosophy Facts Lasts Human Beings Existence Principles Eternal Absolutes Formulas Brahman Atman Sanskrit

Book:The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West

Source: The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West

“Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, - the fear instinct.”

Humans Self Existence Depends Institutions Instinct Impulse Stability Associates Preservation Self Preservation

Author:Boris Sidis

“the tormented world cries out for internationhood, for co-existence in a harmony of diversity and mutual aid, for an end to self-segregation along secondary or superficial or downright imbecilic lines.”

World Ends Self Lines Existence Cry Diversity Harmony Aids Mutual Superficial Segregation Mutual Aid

Book:Revolution, She Wrote

Source: Revolution, She Wrote

“The existence of a medium, after all, is its absolute justification, if as so many seem to think, it needs one and all comparison of potentialities is useless and irrelevant. Whether a water-color is inferior to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. [emphasis added] Let us rather accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization.”

“Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.”

Men Needs Should Humans Wells Self Philosophy Opportunity Existence Self Esteem Strive Esteem Existential Pathetic Nihilism Shattered Man And Nature Meaningfulness Purposefulness

Author:Ray Brassier

“Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.”

Self Faces Individual Existence Successful Conditions Personality Determination Universal Absolutes Individuality Supreme Realization Self Determination Affirmation Adaptation Innate

Author:Carl Jung

“You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.”

Ifs Giving Two Self Law Existence Moral Ethics Destruction Neighbor Boundaries Objectives Self Destruction Relativism Moral Law

Author:Ravi Zacharias

“[The human mind] finds more facility in assenting to the self-existence of an invisible cause possessing infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, than in the self-existence of the universe, visibly destitute of these attributes, and which may be the effect of them.”

Mind Humans May Self Religion Universe Causes Existence Effects Goodness Infinite Invisible Human Mind Attributes Facility Possessing Destitute Infinite Power

Author:James Madison

“A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.”

People Self Existence Anger Strings Suspects Reproach

Book:Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Source: Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

“Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.”

World Feels Mind Two Self Hands Sides Existence Middle Surface Divides Partition Foils Thickness

Book:The collected works of Samuel Beckett

Source: The collected works of Samuel Beckett

Existence Quotes

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Existence Quotes