Quotes, maxims and aphorisms - to be - Buboquote.com

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays /

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Become who you are!

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra /

to be

Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.

Niccolo Machiavelli /

to be

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

William Shakespeare - The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark /

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Background photo by Ilkka Kärkkäinen on Unsplash

People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are.

Meister Eckhart /

Become such as you are, having learned what that is.

Pindar - Pythian Odes /

to be

Tell yourself, first of all, what kind of man you want to be; and then go ahead with what you are doing.

to be

Only he who loves something is something; to be nothing and to love nothing are identical.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach /

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Martin Heidegger /

I think, therefore I am.

René Descartes - Discourse on the Method /

A beautiful soul has no other merit than its own existence.

Friedrich Schiller - On Grace and Dignity /

Some things are hastening to be, others to have come and gone, and a part of what is coming into being is already extinct.

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations /

Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are.

Fernando Pessoa /

Sometimes I think. Sometimes I am.

Paul Valéry - Tel quel /

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Man is the shepherd of Being.

Martin Heidegger /

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Albert Camus - The Rebel /

to be

Everything that was is no longer; everything that will be is not yet. Look no further for the secret of our ills.

Alfred de Musset /

To be is to be perceived or to perceive.

George Berkeley /

To be is to be perceived or to perceive.

Men are as the time is.

William Shakespeare - King Lear

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

to be

We do not do what we want and nonetheless we are responsible for what we are.

Jean-Paul Sartre /

For if I am deceived, I am.

Augustine of Hippo - The City of God /

to be

I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.

Henry David Thoreau /

I am not what I once was.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus /

We are nothing; what we seek is everything.

Friedrich Hölderlin /

to be

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

Gabrielle Chasnel, dîte Coco Chanel