Existential Hardship Quotes

To labour is the lot of man below; And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.

...But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

I am simply trying to struggle through life; trying to do God's bidding.

[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.

What is ugly about life is that it so often only provides uneasy half solutions that are so seldom pure and tragic ones.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should ou have your pride in the morning nad your resignation in the evening?

It's really hard to do this life - to be a human being alone.

Life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.

Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

With what shift and pains we come into the World we remember not; but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it.

Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?

All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.

However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do.

The universe, he observed, makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.

Painfully to attain possession of what we do not want, and then painfully to waste our days in attempting to rid ourselves of it, seems to be a part of our discipline here below.

There were so many layers of reality to the world. Nothing stopped for death; nothing stopped for grief or horror or tragedy.

Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords to the relieving these necessities.

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.