#existence

The part of life we really live is small.' For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#life #living #quality-of-life #time #life

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. ↗

— John Fowles

#movies #reading #movies

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

#extinction #failure #thought #nature

Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#ethics #religion #religion

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for a practical existence. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#art

A 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

#existence #obligation #purpose #universe #purpose

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. ↗

— William Blake

#energy #existence #hate #human #human existence

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

#fathers #generations #knowledge #relationships #sons

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

#politics #sociology #sociology

Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace. ↗

— John Desmond Bernal

#awaits #dominate #dream #existence #human