Charles Baudelaire Quotes

We are united in that we are all human beings, and we are all together on this horrible, painful, joyous, exciting, and mysterious ride that is being alive.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

I am primarily concerned with the condition of man.

Literature hasn't come up with any new themes. The literature of all different times - it's still dealing with how one resolves issues of existence.

The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

Humankind is made for uncertainty, struggle, choice and change.

There's no victory-condition for being human.

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.

Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

Ultimately, the human being is in the mercy of nature.

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.

I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many -- myself and humanity in flux.

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here's three on's are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.