Existential Cost Quotes

He that lives most dies most.

Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

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

Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats.

If a man should happen to reach perfection in this world, he would have to die immediately to enjoy himself.

You can buy life only with life.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

I believe the cost of life is Death and we will all pay that in full. Everything else should be a gift.

We all pay for life with death, so everything in between should be free.

My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

One pays dearly for being immortal: one must die many times during his life.

Disease is the tax which the soul pays for the body, as the tenant pays house-rent for the use of the house.

The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears

Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.

A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life - the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave.

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold... 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 'T is only God may be had for the asking; There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer.

Was their love worth the erasure of the world and all its stories?

The richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay...

Whatever it takes for you to find your freedom, that's what you've lived.