Quotes about Existence

Indeed, the only truely serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truely serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set limits, describes the boundaries of human exsistence.

Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe—no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.

If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

We live in two different dimensions, you and I.

The dispute between those who believe that the world was created by God and those who think it came into being of its own accord deals with phenomena that go beyond our reason and experience. Much more real is the line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation.

the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear [...] without the mitigating circumstances of their transitory nature

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain. ? Milan Kundera, Immortality (Gardners Books; 1st edition, July 31, 2000) Originally published January 12th 1990.

What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have hap-pened at all. If we have only one life to live,we might as well not have lived at all.

I think love is the core emotion. Without that, and I've certainly existed without that, it's a very empty life.

At the end of our lives we all ask, did i live? Did i love? Did i matter?