be

be vb Be, exist, live, subsist are comparable when they mean to have actuality or reality.

Be applies to whatever has a place in the realm of things describable as real in a material or immaterial sense; only its context makes clear whether it asserts physical or spiritual reality

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to be, or not to be: that is the question— Shak.

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I think, therefore I am— translation

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whatever is, is right— Pope

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Exist adds to be the implication of continuance in time; it also commonly implies a place in the realm of things which are describable as entities or as having independent, objective being

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a fact which has existed cannot be made never to have existed— John Marshall

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everybody saw the drawings of the temples, strange walls and columns, but nobody believed these things existed— Stark Young

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Live basically implies existence in the realm of things possessing the character called life, which distinctively characterizes plants and animals and is manifest especially in metabolism, growth, and reproduction

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many men live to be threescore and ten

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plants cannot live without moisture

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whatever lives must have sustenance

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Live, however, is often applied in an extended sense to immaterial entities (as ideas or beliefs); in this use it may carry a suggestion of qualities associated with life (as persistent existence, vigor, activity, and development)

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his name will live as long as his country lives

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poems that live

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Subsist may be used in place of be, or exist, or live because it may imply the kind of reality or actuality connoted by one of those terms, but it (or more particularly its related adjective, subsistent) often additionally suggests a relation to or dependence on something; thus, a thing that subsists by itself (a self-subsistent thing) is independent and self-contained; an idea subsists or maintains its existence only so long as it appeals to the mind of thinking men

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those secret distributions without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor— Addison

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In philosophical use subsist is used often in reference to purely mental conceptions and implies logical validity or the character of being true or logically conceivable

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the round square ... is an object, which neither exists, nor subsists, nor has any kind of being at all— Chisholm

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