The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
Arthur Schopenhauer

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
Ambrose Bierce

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.
Franz Kafka

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Richard Dawkins

You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.
Deepak Chopra

It is possible to demonstrate God's existence, although not a priori, yet a posteriori from some work of His more surely known to us.
Thomas Aquinas

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Edmund Burke

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
Eric Hoffer

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Erich Fromm

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm

Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
Lord Byron

But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.
Lord Byron

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
Albert Schweitzer

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Honore de Balzac

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
Honore de Balzac

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
Thomas Merton

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
William James

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.
Paul Tillich