"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? To die, to sleep, no more! and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is air to. 'Tis a consummation devoutely to be wished. To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream; Aye there's the rub that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the laws delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? For who would Fardels bare to grunt and sweat under a dreary life. But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose born, no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have then fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscious does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sickeled o'er with the pale cast of thought. And enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard, their current turn ary, and lose the name of action. Soft you now thy fair Ophelia, Nymph in thy orisions. Be all my sins remembered"
— William Shakespeare

"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. "
— Neil Gaiman (The Books of Magic)

"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

"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist and that I am not a gibbering moron."
— Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl El Mundo Subterraneo / Artemis Fowl)

"Love, is everything it's cracked up to be. Life is everything it's cracked up to be. So, all and everything you hear and know and feel about these Is true."
— Indira Reyes

"Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all."
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"There would be a black, six-foot deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s grave.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence."
— Haruki Murakami (Murakami Omnibus: "A Wild Sheep Chase", "Dance Dance Dance")

"
Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent."
— Brian Greene

"Don’t you know what god is? God is everything and God is nothing; for the perfection created by man cannot be anything other than nothing. They decided to give a name to nothingness, and thereby the made it become something. Like you… God, who is nothing, can no longer be nothing since he is God. You could be a god for men. They need to give a body to nothingness so that nothingness can be seen and touched-at least with the imagination."
— Aldo Palazzeschi (Man of Smoke)

"Look, I am living. On what? Neither
childhood nor future
lessens . . . . Superabundant existence
wells in my heart."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight)

"Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy."
— Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)

""Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.""
— bill hicks

"In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Mi existencia es incomprensible y ridícula"
— Michael Ende (Mirror in the mirror)

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live."
— Albert Camus (Lyrical and Critical Essays)

""You were right," said the Master impressed by the neatness of Korovyov's work, "when you said: no documents, no person. So that means I don't exist since I don't have any documents.""
— Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)

"If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent."
— Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)

"The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence."
— Augustine Birrell

"Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences."
— Bertrand Russell (The Problems of Philosophy)

"It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence."
— Kedar Joshi

"Life is a question asked by God about the way he exists."
— Kedar Joshi

"The most fundamental tragedy of my life is that the ones who I see do not exist
and the one who exists I do not see."
— Kedar Joshi

"If you place [your bet] with God, you lose nothing, even if it turns out that God does not exist. But if you place it against God, and you are wrong and God does exist, you lose everything."
— Peter Kreeft (Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics)

"The gap in the fire which had opened up before him, so that the twisted grimace on the face of existence had become visible through the play of the flames, narrowed to disappear completely. His back hurt and he could hear darkness breathing audibly."
— Paul Leppin (Blaugast: A Novel of Decline)

" Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly.
Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet
about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of
some secret hope."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"On the Bigotry of Culture:
: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing."
— José Ortega y Gasset (The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature)

"...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced."
— Michael Burawoy (Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism)

"Define the word exist, and you'll know whether God exists."
— Bill Gaede (Why God Doesn't Exist)

"Think in this way of all this fleeting world: As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a drop of dew, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."
— The Diamond Sutra

"I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration."
— Machado de Assis