Guy de Maupassant Quotes

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

Life is simply the reification of the process of living.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

I think, therefore I am.

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

The Greeks are wrong to recognize coming into being and perishing; for nothing comes into being nor perishes, but is rather compounded or dissolved from things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being composition and perishing dissolution.

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.

As long as you are a part of the physical process of the existence, there is nothing that does not change.

Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.

Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.

We're just blades of grass, and when we go, we go, we never come back; one life . . . maybe that's true. But I tend to believe that this is not all there is. Because my life has been like a shadow of something deeper. And I've experienced that many times.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

The coming being is whatever being.

Even when I think about the fact that energy can become matter and matter can become energy, I have a very strong feeling that there's something afterward.

For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains floating and flying in the will of the air, often forgetting ever being in that state, but in sleep I migrate back.

By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

All objects exist in a moment of time.

Nothingness haunts Being.