Existential Limit Quotes

Death is the ultimate boundary of human matters.

A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence.

When you come to the end, that's where God begins.

Every man carries the seed of his own death, and you will not be more than a man. You will have everything; you cannot have more.

If you've done what you need to do, you need to go bury yourself, because what else are you going to do? I think that that's where life stops.

Death is like an arrow that is already in flight, and your life lasts only until it reaches you.

Time is infinite, but we are not infinite in it.

Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.

The simple truth of our finiteness is that we could, by whatever means, go on interminably only at the price of either losing the past and, therewith, our identity, or living only in the past and therefore without a real present. We cannot seriously wish either and thus not a physical enduring at that price.

Fear is not life-giving enough to sustain itself. We can move in the direction of fear only so long before it brings us to our knees, or to our end.

Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people--what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest level of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.

When we see what the universe has to show us, we can go no further.

No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

In the nature of things, I must soon lose sight of this sense of constant metamorphosis whose limits bound our human life.

If creation was given no limit, ultimately everything would cease to exist.

Your presence here is is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t.