#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.”

“What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth andheaven?”

“Everything is made of one hidden stuff.”

“What a piece of work is a man”

“Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored”

“The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.”

“Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.”

“The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty.”

“The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.”

“An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.”

“As long as any man exists, there is some need of him.”

“We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live.”

“We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves.”

“We are such stuff that dreams are made of.”

“Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.”

“The life of this world is nothing but the harmony of opposites”

“Life has a way of demanding that you live it.”

“Who says the eternal being does not exist? Who says the sun has gone out? Someone who climbs up on the roof and closes his eyes tight, and says, I don't see anything.”

“How do I know who I am or where I am? How could a single wave locate itself in an ocean.”

“We are the mirror as well as the face in it.We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.We are pain and what cures pain both.We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.”

“Everything has to do with loving and not loving.”

“Watch for all that beauty reflecting from you and sing a love song to your existence.”

“What strange beings we are! That sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark, we're afraid of our own immortality.”

“Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of the bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.”

“There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

“ROSENCRANTZ My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. HAMLET The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing - GUILDENSTERN A thing my lord? HAMLET Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after!”