It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
Being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.
The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
Every life is its own excuse for being.
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
I don't exist when you don't see me.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.
We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.
One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.
There's a time when you have to explain to your children why they're born, and it's a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
I exist in a state of almost perpetual hysteria.
— Sting
Being is the great explainer.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
I can, therefore I am.