Existential Debt Quotes

I took one Draught of Life - I'll tell you what I paid - Precisely an existence - The market price, they said.

Without my dad, I wouldn't be here.

It may be that them whose pleasure brings you into this world owes you a living, but it don't mean the world is responsible.

Life does not owe you anything, because life has already given you everything.

We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?

To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.

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

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan

Although she [America] might have had pressing provocations, yet she ought to have looked to this country as the guardian power to which she was indebted not only for her comforts, not only for her rank in the scale of civilization but for her very existence.

I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.

Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.

In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; Form the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God's being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it.