Quotes about Existence

Nothing is what rocks dream about

Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon

those who inquire into the number of existents: for they inquire whether the ultimate constituents of existing things are one or many, and if many, whether a finite or an infinite plurality.

a man investigating principles cannot argue with one who denies their existence.

If, then, 'substance' is not attributed to anything, but other things are attributed to it, how does 'substance' mean what is rather than what is not?

And if a man believes nothing, but believes it equally so and not so, how would his state be different from a vegetable's?

it seems impossible for all things to be one.

It is, then, clearly impossible for Being to be one in this sense.

Even if our contact with eternal beings is slight, none the less because of its surpassing value this knowledge is a greater pleasure than our knowledge of everything around us.

After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.

Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. It's smell and it's color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.