Quotes about existence

I move, therefore I am.

If you continue investigating, you will find that there is nothing anywhere, not even a single atom, that has a verifiable existence.

Still sitting there, still looking up in the tree.

At something that isn’t there? Luke wondered.

Or at something that isn’t there for me but is there for him, and which of us is right?

And he thinks that I don’t exist and I think I do, and which of us is right about that?

Well, I am, on that point if no other. I think, therefore I am.

But how do I know he’s there?

Why couldn’t he be a figment of my imagination?

Silly solipsism, the type of wondering just about everybody goes through sometime during adolescence, and then recovers from.

But it gives to wonder all over again when you and other people start seeing things differently or start seeing different things.

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

To exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas.

But who am I? What right have I to decide? What is it that determines my judgments? If they are inevitable, if they are the results of the impressions I receive, I am wasting my strength in such inquiries; they would be made or not without any interference of mine. I must therefore first turn my eyes upon myself to acquaint myself with the instrument I desire to use, and to discover how far it is reliable. I exist, and I have senses through which I receive impressions. This is the first truth that strikes me and I am forced to accept it.

It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.

If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.