101 Quotes About Existence

In a world brimming with complexity and wonder, the quest to understand existence has perennially intrigued philosophers, poets, and thinkers across the ages. These explorations into the fabric of being, the nature of reality, and the essence of life itself have inspired an abundance of profound reflections, encapsulating timeless wisdom and introspection. In our curated collection of the top 101 quotes about existence, we journey through some of the most thought-provoking musings ever penned, each offering a unique lens through which to ponder the enigma of our own existence. Whether you're seeking a moment of deep reflection or a spark of philosophical curiosity, these quotes promise to inspire and illuminate, encouraging you to delve deeper into the mysteries of life.

1. “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")” - Charles Baudelaire

2. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” - Sylvia Plath

3. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” - Cormac McCarthy

4. “Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.” - Denis Diderot

5. “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.” - Albert Einstein

6. “When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.” - Stephen Crane

7. “A Man Said to the UniverseA man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!”“However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” - Stephen Crane

8. “In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” - Oscar Wilde

9. “You were right," said the Master impressed by the neatness of Korovyov's work, "when you said: no documents, no person. So that means I don't exist since I don't have any documents.” - Mikhail Bulgakov

10. “You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.” - Neale Donald Walsch

11. “I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?” - Guy de Maupassant

12. “If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.” - Jostein Gaarder

13. “Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron.” - Eoin Colfer

14. “Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature’s impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it’s like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans of fly above its forests—even though most animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild.” - Thomas French

15. “It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.” - Ken Kesey

16. “The fact of God is necessary for the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.” - A. W. Tozer

17. “Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.” - Clarice Lispector

18. “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.” - Salman Rushdie

19. “Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

20. “You only exist because of the agreements you made with yourself and with the other humans around you.” - Jose Luis Ruiz

21. “Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.” - Tom Robbins

22. “Look: the trees exist; the houseswe dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only wepass by it all, like a rush of air.And everything conspires to keep quiet about us,half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

23. “If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

24. “Nature, it seems, is the popular namefor milliards and milliards and milliardsof particles playing their infinite gameof billiards and billiards and billiards.” - Piet Hein

25. “People who say that yesterday was better than today are ultimately devaluing their own existence.” - Karl Lagerfeld

26. “You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no . . . anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever . . . lost.” - J.K. Rowling

27. “On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.” - José Ortega y Gasset

28. “When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.” - Carl Sagan

29. “He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

30. “It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence.” - Kedar Joshi

31. “Life is a question asked by God about the way he exists.” - Kedar Joshi

32. “Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.” - Richard Dawkins

33. “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” - Jack London

34. “What is this thing called life? I believeThat 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 lifeThat oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energyMakes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things growFrom a chemical reaction?I think they were here already, I think the rocksAnd the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxieshave their various consciousness, all things are conscious;But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brainBring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glassTo concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearthFrom which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animalsBorn howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryardPrefer 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

35. “Who will read these poems when the people are gone?” - Dominic Owen Mallary

36. “I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.” - Carl Sagan

37. “We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?” - Tom Robbins

38. “The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.” - Herman Wouk

39. “I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.” - David Almond

40. “Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.” - Christopher Hitchens

41. “All objects exist in a moment of time.” - Amy Tan

42. “I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.” - Stanislaw Lem

43. “I murmur: "It's a seat," a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated—bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the water, floating with the current, belly in the air in a great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey's belly, my feet dangling in the clear water.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

44. “You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.” - Italo Calvino

45. “It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.” - Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev

46. “It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.” - E.L. Doctorow

47. “I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

48. “Tell me something. Do you believe in God?'Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What? Who still believes nowadays?''It isn't that simple. I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new--do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an...imperfect God?''What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals...''No,' I interrupted. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.'Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks:'There was Manicheanism...''Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot...'Snow pondered for a while:'I don't know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been...necessary. If i understand you, and I'm afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn't this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.'I kept on:'No, it's nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom--apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being--the being I have in mind--cannot exist in the plural, you see? ...Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while...''We already have,' Snow said sarcastically. 'Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.''If you're going to take what I say literally...'...Snow asked abruptly:'What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.” - Stanisław Lem

49. “What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.” - Stanisław Lem

50. “There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” - John Green

51. “Today, you have the opportunity to transcend from a disempowered mindset of existence to an empowered reality of purpose-driven living. Today is a new day that has been handed to you for shaping. You have the tools, now get out there and create a masterpiece.” - Steve Maraboli

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

53. “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

54. “Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?” - Stanisław Lem

55. “Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence.” - Julianne Davidow

56. “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.” - Marilynne Robinson

57. “Truth, says instrumentalism, is what works out, that which does what you expect it to do. The judgment is true when you can "bank" on it and not be disappointed. If, when you predict, or when you follow the lead of your idea or plan, it brings you to the ends sought for in the beginning, your judgment is true. It does not consist in agreement of ideas, or the agreement of ideas with an outside reality; neither is it an eternal something which always is, but it is a name given to ways of thinking which get the thinker where he started. As a railroad ticket is a "true" one when it lands the passenger at the station he sought, so is an idea "true," not when it agrees with something outside, but when it gets the thinker successfully to the end of his intellectual journey. Truth, reality, ideas and judgments are not things that stand out eternally "there," whether in the skies above or in the earth beneath; but they are names used to characterize certain vital stages in a process which is ever going on, the process of creation, of evolution. In that process we may speak of reality, this being valuable for our purposes; again, we may speak of truth; later, of ideas; and still again, of judgments; but because we talk about them we should not delude ourselves into thinking we can handle them as something eternally existing as we handle a specimen under the glass. Such a conception of truth and reality, the instrumentalist believes, is in harmony with the general nature of progress. He fails to see how progress, genuine creation, can occur on any other theory on theories of finality, fixity, and authority; but he believes that the idea of creation which we have sketched here gives man a vote in the affairs of the universe, renders him a citizen of the world to aid in the creation of valuable objects in the nature of institutions and principles, encourages him to attempt things "unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," inspires him to the creation of "more stately mansions," and to the forsaking of his "low vaulted past." He believes that the days of authority are over, whether in religion, in rulership, in science, or in philosophy; and he offers this dynamic universe as a challenge to the volition and intelligence of man, a universe to be won or lost at man’s option, a universe not to fall down before and worship as the slave before his master, the subject before his king, the scientist before his principle, the philosopher before his system, but a universe to be controlled, directed, and recreated by man’s intelligence.” - Holly Estil Cunningham

58. “Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist.” - Kenneth Patchen

59. “Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt.” - Lionel Shriver

60. “It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.” - H.P. Lovecraft

61. “True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.” - Tiffany Madison

62. “Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.” - Hermann Hesse

63. “She did not care about anything very much. Hope was gone. She existed that was all.” - Donna Woolfolk Cross

64. “You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.” - N.K. Jemisin

65. “Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

66. “We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.” - Thomas Bernhard

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

68. “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

69. “[Y]ou are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.” - Steven L. Peck

70. “It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.” - Steven L. Peck

71. “That’s what happens when you crowd enough folks into the same sandbox: eventually they’re gonna start throwing a fit over who gets what part to play with.” - Jacob D. Lochner

72. “We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.” - Emil Cioran

73. “Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.” - Don DeLillo

74. “The mystery of existence is the connection between our wins and our losses.” - George Alexiou

75. “Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars...” - Oswald Spengler

76. “As a child I first became aware that my existence had a purpose when I realized men lusted after me. And that's why I will lust forever after men. Before I even began to worry about homework or any of those school things, I began having secret liaisons with men. And it is men who give me the proof I need now to feel I'm alive.” - Natsuo Kirino

77. “Somewhere beyond the pain, you turn around and realize that life is beautiful.” - T.L. Rese

78. “To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.” - Fernando Pessoa

79. “Die. Do you think I will? I suppose I must...I exist now, and everything that exists must end, one day. I wonder how I will die, and what it will be like. It will be most interesting, don't you think? [...] Yes. Yes, I think it will," said the wolf. "I look forward to it. On the whole, I think it is a very strange and terrifying thing, to exist. I really don't understand how you do it. Tell me - how do you deal with the fear? "The fear?" asked George. "Yes. That fear that comes from the feeling that there is you, and then there is...everything else. That you are trapped inside of yourself, a tiny dot insignificant in the face of every everything that could ever be. How do you manage that?" George considered how to answer. "I...guess we just never think about it.""Never think about it!" cried the wolf. "How can you not think about it when it confronts you at every moment? You are lost amid a wide, dark sea, with no shores in sight, and you all so rarely panic! Some days I can barely function, so how on earth can you never think about it?""Well, I...suppose we distract ourselves," said George. "But with what?". "I don't know. With all kinds of things.” - Robert Jackson Bennett

80. “Coincidences give you opportunities to look more deeply into your existence.” - Doug Dillon

81. “He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn't a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped.” - Stephen King

82. “...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.” - Jeanette Winterson

83. “But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us - the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.” - J.B. Priestley

84. “Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.” - Aberjhani

85. “For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.” - Criss Jami

86. “Really good writing has purpose and that purpose should be to shape other minds to desire truth and a more noble purpose in life and to become more thoughtful and knowledgable about important things like being kind and loving towards all living beings on our planet and not just humans but all animals.” - Susan Waterfield

87. “You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world.” - David Foster Wallace

88. “Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards.' In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to 'fly upwards” - Andrei Tarkovsky

89. “...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.” - Andrei Tarkovsky

90. “If this was the true self it was marvelous and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led to an independent existence.” - Henry Miller

91. “Delusions are a vital part of my existence.” - Jason Krumbine

92. “I,' she began in her thoughts, as we all do when thinking of ourselves. But this I was her, something, someone whose life she really lived. She was this I, in body and soul, one with its very flesh, its memories, its past, present and future, all of which we seal into a single destiny each time we face ourselves and utter that tiny, unalterable word: 'I.” - Dezső Kosztolányi

93. “No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny,cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy” - Allen Ginsberg

94. “At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.” - Gustave Flaubert

95. “I have always had the capacity to go within myself and to discover the silence within, the inner meditative quality, the inner source of love and truth – the inner language of silence.Now I also notice that this silence is going deeper, and that I go beyond the ego and disappear into the silence.First this brought up fear, but now I am enjoying this meditation of disappering into the silence and to be nobody. I have started experimenting with this phenomenon to understand how to consciously go beyond the ego: yesterday when I took a cofee at a restaurant, I consciously turned my attention within and disappeared into the silence, which was like finding an inner source of bliss. In aloneness, I experiment with being consciously alone as a door to be egoless. In conscious aloneness, the ego can not function. In aloneness, your are not. When I am walking, I consciously experiment with being with Existence without having the mind constantly commenting. I try to just be wordlessly with the people and situations that I meet on my walk. When I can just be with Existence, it opens the door to be one with the Whole.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

96. “It is astonishing to realize that growing up actually means to become one with Existence. It means to find the whole Existence within myself, it means to discover that Existence is alive in my own heart and being. The song of a bird echoes my own inner voice, the beauty of a flower reflects my own inner beauty, a dog becomes an expression of my own unconditional love and friendship, the majestic mountains create an exstatic joy, and I discover all the shining stars of the sky within my own heart. It is to realize that the whole Existence is alive, and that the underlying thread of consciousness is God.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

97. “Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean. In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence. Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog. Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

98. “Geri dönemiyordum, hangi yolu tutarsam tutayım kendime çıkamıyordum.” - Hüsnü Arkan

99. “Life is really very simple. In each moment, we have the opportunity to choose between saying “yes” or “no”, to listen to our intuition, to listen to our true inner voice, the Existential voice within ourselves. When we say “yes”, we have contact with Existence and we receive nourishment, love, joy, support and inspiration. When we say “no”, we create a separation from life and begin to create dreams and expectations of how it should be. We begin to live in the memories of the past and in the fantasies of the future – as if any other time than here and now really could make us happy and satisfied.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

100. “Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.” - Margaret Atwood

101. “If you believe in existence, you will refuse to be a hero!” - Mehmet Murat ildan