Quotes about Existence

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. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.

It was surely well for man that he came late in the order of creation. There

Save for the occasional use of cocaine, he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.

What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.

Once you are born in this world you're old enough to die.

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?

Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal... Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.

Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being, whatever his age may be.

He who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

That in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.

God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.