Exist Quotes
More Exist Quotes
Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related of me which exist only in the regions of fancy. With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man.
daniel boone— As quoted in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1993) by John Mack Faragher p. 302
Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness.
ford madox ford— The Good Soldier, Part Four, Ch. VI (p. 253)
Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit ; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.
erik erikson— Young Man Luther : A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958), p. 70
The world needed only two things to exist in peace : English literature – Shakespeare – and Carnatic music which cam express everything that humans wish musically to express. Carnatic music was the most essential music of humanity .
— A musician in Madras, in p. 160 (The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts)
Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
karen blixen— "The Diver"
It is good to be a cynic it is better to be a contented cat and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
h. p. lovecraft— "Nietzscheism and Realism" from The Rainbow, Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1921); reprinted in "To Quebec and the Stars", and also in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 71
In vita itaque apprime utile est, intellectum seu Rationem, quantum possumus, perficere, et in hoc uno summa hominis felicitas seu beatitudo consistit; quippe beatitudo nihil aliud est, quam ipsa animi acquiescentia quae ex Dei intuitiva cognitione oritur. It is therefore extrememly useful in life to perfect as much as we can the intellect or reason, and of this alone doesthegreatest happiness or blessedness of man exist: for blessedness is nothing else than satisfaction of mind which arises from the intuitive knowledge of God.
Baruch also known as Benedict de Spinoza Spinoza— 1677 Ethics, bk.4, appendix.
I believe in fairies. Although I can't prove they exist, nobody has ever managed to prove to me that they don't.
Peter Blake— Simon O'Hagan "Credo:Peter Blake", The Independent on Sunday, 2005-11-20. Accessed from findarticles.com, 2007-01-22
The ignorant are like useless, brackish soil; they exist and that is all.
thiruvalluvar— Verse XLI.6
Strike an enemy once and for all. Let him cease to exist as a tribe or he will live to fly in your throat again.
shaka zulu— Advice to King Dingiswayo on the treatment of the defeated Ndwandwe, reported in Shaka Zulu : The Rise of the Zulu Empire (1955) by E. A. Ritter, p. 50.
Discretion, like the hole in a doughnut, does not exist except as an area left open by a surrounding belt of restriction. It is therefore a relative concept. It always makes sense to ask, "Discretion under which standards?" or "Discretion as to which authority?"
ronald dworkin— Taking Rights Seriously (1978), p. 31
[S]cientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits […]. Culture can potentiate as well as constrain as Darwin's translation of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.
stephen jay gould— pp. 6–7 (Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987))
It is sad To lose sight of myself for the sake of myself I believe in scenery no one has ever seen, And next to you, I wish to stay in that place that doesn't exist
ayumi hamasaki— Will
Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time.
Nikos Kazantzakis— Zorba the Greek, Ch. 8 (1946)
I repeat?that all power is a trustthat we are accountable for its exercisethat, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist.
— 1826-7 Vivian Grey, bk.6, ch.10.
We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.
willa cather— Ch. 12 (6 September 1902) near Marseilles, France.
Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.
pitirim sorokin— Sorokin (1927) Social Mobility, p. 12
The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men – were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.
ambrose bierce— Town Crier, column in the San Francisco News-Letter (c. 1870)
Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism… …Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.
Umberto Boccioni— As quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 92
Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is … the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished.
georg brandes— p. 16 (An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889))
The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
ulysses s. grant— Conclusion
There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva).
Immanuel Kant— Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.
bill mollison— chapter 3.10
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
nassim nicholas taleb— p. 17 (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010))
Like bubbles in the water , the worlds rise, exist and dissolve in the Supreme Self, which is the material cause and the prop of everything.
— Adi Shankara, in Atma Bodha
War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist , and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.
cesare pavese— Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, 1939-09-09
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— 1899 A Man Said to the Universe.
The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery . For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that 'A state half slave and half free cannot exist.' All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
— Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Conclusion.
