Patrick deWitt Quotes

Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage

Watch the things you say you can't believe, and then recall the things you accept without thinking, like your own existence.

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live."

Life is. I am. Anything might happen.

If you are not astonished that you exist, your humanity is not complete.

It is very easy to take for granted the phenomenon that we are each alive, but we must try not to.

From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.

I feel awed by the mystery of being both so finite and yet so infinite, so much and so little, so conscious and yet, so coincidental.

I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.

You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

The truth is: you don’t have a life, you are life.

Why does life need evidence of life?

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

Sometimes I wake up in awe that I'm alive. I can't get over that part, so I guess it makes me kind of like an existentialist.

How can you be that which you possess? You cannot be the horse and rider at the same time. Herein lies the secret of mortality and immortality.

Life. Consider the alternative.

Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?

I think, therefore I am ... not here.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.

Man is but the place where I stand.

Knowing that you are living in a dreamworld is very liberating, because it gives you the option of waking up.