To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
We have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper
This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
The problem is a lot of people don't think. The general bloke just goes through life, gets a job, gets married and all that, and that's it.
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.
Nature has made us passive, and to suffer is our lot. While we are in the flesh every man has his chain and his clog; only it is looser and lighter to one man than to another, and he is more at ease who takes it up and carries it than he who drags it.
I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.
The jellyfish doesn't actively move anywhere - it's just moved with the tides. Is that what man is? Man's just the jellyfish: stuff happens to you, and you get twisted in different directions.
Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.
I would rather die fighting for what is right, than live passively amidst all that is wrong.
As I get older the stars have gone from my eyes more, and I see that life is just something that has to be lived with, that it's better not to struggle.
Is it possible to live in this world without the operation of will?
Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
The only thing that isn't free is you. You do as you're told. You sit in your seat until they say 'Stand'. You stay put til they say 'Go'. Maybe that's the way you like it. It's easy. It's all there. You don't have to think about. You don't even have to feel it.
I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.
I'd rather go along with this sense of illusion that I'm a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that's preordained.
I have always had a dread of becoming a passenger in life.
Is the destiny of the human species to sit back and play with our mouse and computer and imagine, fantasize?
On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.
I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.
