Existence Quotes

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.”

“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.”

“I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.”

“And nothing is, but what is not.”

“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”

“All the world's a stage.”

“Life... is a paradise to what we know of death.”

“I cannot tell what you and other menThink of this life; but, for my single self,I had as lief not be as live to beIn awe of such a thing as I myself.”

“And a man's life's no more than to say "One."”

“We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from... Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.”

“Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here's three on's are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”

“Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.”

“The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.”

“Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.”

“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.”

“All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.”

“Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.”

“Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.”

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

“No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.”

“HAMLET [...] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end. CLAUDIUS Alas, alas. HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”

“Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”

“We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.”

“I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.”

“Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.”