Quotes about Existence

Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly: for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort.

For if anything in the world is desirable, so desirable that even the dull and uneducated herd in its more reflective moments would value it more than silver and gold, it is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our existence, and that we should obtain some information about this enigmatical life of ours, in which nothing is clear except its misery and vanity.

Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the tormenting problem of metaphysics.

it is worthy of consideration, indeed marvelous, how besides his life in concreto, a person always leads a second in abstracto as well.

the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.

There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy….So long as we persist in this inborn error, and indeed even become confirmed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world seems to us full of contradictions.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces--growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying, and at any given moment in our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between those two forces.

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change... —Audre Lorde, born #otd

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.