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Existence

ability of an entity to interact with physical or mental reality

Existence has been variously defined by sources. In common usage, it is the world one is aware or conscious of through one's senses, and that persists independent of one's absence. Other definitions describe it as everything that 'is', or more simply, everything. Some define it to be everything that most people believe in. Aristotle relates the concept to causality.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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The Statue of Liberty - The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part .

B

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Luca Giordano - Dream of Solomon - Karl W. Benzing:[So], non-existence of nothingness proves Basic Existence! Since God must be basic Existence, the mere presence of basic Existence proves the existence of God.
 
Wilamowitz, K.Borinski:Ananke remained an elusive outsider, often perceived as cruel. But it is important that at an early stage religious and philosophical speculation closely linked Ananke to the elements of the world's existence (among which Goethe included her too).
  • EXISTENCE, n.
    A transient, horrible, fantastic dream,
    Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem:
    From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge
    Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!"
    • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

C

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  • And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
  • “Is absence of proof the same as proof of absence?” Ochoa asked.
    “After centuries of zero evidence? Yes.”
    • Tom Crosshill, The Magician and Laplace’s Demon (2014), reprinted in Rich Horton (ed.), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (p. 412)

D

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  • For thousands of years, human beings have contemplated the world about them and asked the great questions of existence... Today... many of these great questions are part of science, and some scientists claim they may be on the verge of providing answers.
    • Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (2007)
  • Perhaps existence isn't something that gets bestowed from the outside, by having "fire breathed" into a potentiality by some unexplained fire-breathing agency (that is, a transcendent existence generator) but is ...something self-activating. I have suggested that only self-consistent loops capable of understanding themselves can create themselves, so that only universes with (at least the potential for) life and mind really exist.
    • Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (2007)
  • The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.
  • It is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.
  • Value is this lacking-being of which freedom makes itself a lack; and it is because the latter makes itself a lack that value appears. It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged. But first it locates itself beyond any pessimism, as beyond any optimism, for the fact of its original springing forth is a pure contingency. Before existence there is no more reason to exist than not to exist. The lack of existence can not be evaluated since it is the fact on the basis of which all evaluation is defined. It can not be compared to anything for there is nothing outside of it to serve as a term of comparison.
  • Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else.
  • It is unjustifiable from without, to declare from without that it is unjustifiable is not to condemn it. And the truth is that outside of existence there is nobody. Man exists. For him it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what conditions.
  • My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.
  • There is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness.

E

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  • Ninety-nine people out of a hundred have not seriously considered what they mean by the term "exist" nor how a thing qualifies itself to be labelled real.
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson:There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it ...
  • There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it ...

F

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G

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H

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I

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J

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K

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John F. Kennedy:When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
  • They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.
  • The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However, vast darkness, we must supply our own light.

L

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  • The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our web-like existence in the world. We clump into family, association, and companies.
  • Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

M

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Orison Swett Marden: The universe is one great kindergarden for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson...
  • Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

N

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  • We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.

O

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P. D. Ouspensky:Man is confronted with two obvious facts: The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself.

P

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Robert Peel:Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
  • Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
  • Every morning I wake up with the news of bloodshed. I feel my body, desperate to know whether I’m still alive.
  • An uneasy rhythm of life is more life like than an easy death
  • I asked none why life ends in ways uncertain.
  • Human being is the most complicated chapter of existence

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R

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Ronald Reagan:Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.
  • It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs.

S

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José Gregorio Monagas abolished slavery in Venezuela in 1854.
  • All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All pervading Vishnu, whose nature is Existence-Intelligence; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold.
  • Life could not be lived wet, whether it be in rain or tears.
  • Life doesn't end just because someone leaves.

T

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  • You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
    • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010) Matters Ontological, p. 17.
  • Man’s basic anxiety … drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. … Horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety. … But ultimately the attempts to transform anxiety into fear are vain. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

U

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W

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  • One important reason for studying philosophy is that it deals with fundamental questions about the meaning of our existence.
    • Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics (Fifth ed., 2013), Introduction
  • I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a 'theory of everything' that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realized that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with him, but until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific. The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist.

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Y

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See also

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Wikipedia
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Wiktionary
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