#existence

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for a practical existence. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#art

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. ↗

— William Blake

#energy #existence #hate #human #human existence

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#fathers #generations #knowledge #relationships #sons

I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. (Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo) ↗

— Epicurus

#existence #life #death

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. ↗

— Amiri Baraka

#even #existence #finally #forces #important

From my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God. ↗

— George Berkeley

#being #created #dependency #existence #find

Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life. ↗

— Charlotte Bunch

#existence #fact #lesbians #lies #life

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose. ↗

— William Cowper

#comes #everything #existence #happiness #life

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. ↗

— John Fowles

#movies #reading #movies

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought. ↗

— Thomas Bernhard

#extinction #failure #thought #nature