Existentialism Quotes - Page 4

The Existentially Preoccupied Long Distance RunnerSometimes I like to run so hard and for so longwith each mile I can feel the pain of my own awareness,my own heightened consciousness of what ails me,the ills of the world,the limitations of our existence,the losses we must endure,the superficial interactions.Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so longthat I can feel all of these feelings seep out of the pours of my own skin,the sweat cleansing my very being,my awareness of beauty heightened,the experience of joy possible,each mile, each minute, ridding me of these feelings,washing away the illusions,showing me the truth.Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so long…until finally I feel free…until finally I AM free…

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

I wish I could see butterflies burst from cocoonsWithout tempering my amazementKnowing all beauty eventually dies.

Justin Wetch

Who am I? The great inquiry indeed.

Yogananda Paramhansa

The very fact of being human panics us into the most grotesque play-acting imaginable; and we deal in absurdities to keep life from being a total waste, like one constant jacking-off party.

Hal Bennett

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

George Santayana

Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?

Franz Kafka

A Chinese proverb: Outside of sky there is sky, outside of people there are people. It is the idea of infinity and also that there will always be someone better than you.

Weike Wang

Let us see what words can do. Will you understand me, for a start, if I tell you that I have never known what I am? My vices, my virtues, are under my nose, but I can’t see them, nor stand far enough back to view myself as a whole. I seem to be a sort of flabby mass in which words are engulfed; no sooner do I name myself than what is named is merged in him who names, and one gets no farther. I have often wanted to hate myself and, as you know, had good reasons for so doing. But my attempted hatred of myself was absorbed into my insubstantiality and was nothing but a recollection. I could not love myself either, I am sure, though I have never tried to. But I was eternally compelled to be myself; I was my own burden, but never burdensome enough, Mathieu. For one instant, on that June evening when I elected to confess to you, I thought I had encountered myself in your bewildered eyes.You saw me, in your eyes I was solid and predictable; my acts and moods were the actual consequences of a definite entity. And through me you knew that entity. I described it to you in my words, I revealed to you facts unknown to you, which had helped you to visualize it. And yet you saw it, I merely saw you seeing it. For one instant you were the heaven-sent mediator between me and myself, you perceived that compact and solid entity which I was and wanted to be in just as simple and ordinary a way as I perceived you. For, after all, I exist, I am, though I have no sense of being; and it is an exquisite torment to discover in oneself such utterly unfounded certainty, such unsubstantiated pride. I then understood that one could not reach oneself except through another’s judgment, another’s hatred. And also through another’s love perhaps; but there is here no question of that. For this revelation I am not ungrateful to you. I do not know how you would describe our present relations. Not goodwill, nor wholly hatred. Put it that there is a corpse between us. My corpse.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nobody needs saving, just a little bit of empathy

John O'Callaghan

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Albert Camus

The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous, with its own necessities and patterns. The message they were beating out, over and over, was for her; it was saying, not precisely that she did not exist but rather that it did not matter whether she existed or not, that her presence was of no consequence to the rest of the cosmos. It was a sensation that suddenly paralyzed her with dread. There had never been any question of her “mattering”; it went without saying that she mattered, because she was important to herself. But what was the part of her to which she mattered?

Paul Bowles

I do not know which impulse was stronger in me when I began to think: the original thirst for knowledge or the urge to communicate with man. Knowledge attains its full meaning only through the bond that unites men; however, the urge to achieve agreement with another human being was so hard to satisfy. I was shocked by the lack of understanding, paralyzed, as it were, by every reconciliation in which what had gone before was not fully cleared up. Early in my life and then later again and again I was perplexed by people’s rigid inaccessibility and their failure to listen to reasons, their disregard of facts, their indifference which prohibited discussion, their defensive attitude which kept you at a distance and at the decisive moment buried any possibility of a close approach, and finally their shamelessness, that bares its own soul without reserve, as though no one were present. When ready assent occurred I remained unsatisfied, because it was not based on true insight but on yielding to persuasion; because it was the consequence of friendly cooperation, not a meeting of two selves. True, I knew the glory of friendship (in common studies, in the cordial atmosphere of home or countryside). But then came the moments of strangeness, as if human beings lived in different worlds. Steadily the consciousness of loneliness grew upon me in my youth, yet nothing seemed more pernicious to me than loneliness, especially the loneliness in the midst of social intercourse that deceives itself in a multitude of friendships. No urge seemed stronger to me than that for communication with others. If the never-completed movement of communication succeeds with but a single human being, everything is achieved. It is a criterion of this success that there be a readiness to communicate with every human being encountered and that grief is felt whenever communication fails. Not merely an exchange of words, nor friendliness and sociability, but only the constant urge towards total revelation reaches the path of communication.

Karl Jaspers

Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.

Søren Kierkegaard

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

Iris Murdoch

Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.

Scarlett Thomas

bullshit french post-war rationalizing

Woody Allen

A series of disconcerting questions nibbles at hearts of troubled youths. These same unanswered questions, along with their acerbic toxins, reveal their pungent fumes more frequently and with greater intensity as a person rushes headfirst into life’s concrete jungle.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The surest of stubborn silences is not to hold one's tongue but to talk

Kierkegaard

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.

Albert Camus

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror

John Fowles

Surprising condition, this, of our existence! To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide.

Ortega y Gasset

Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.

Stephen A. Diamond

All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?

Simone de Beauvoir

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

Andrew Sean Greer

For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

Albert Camus

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—hourly and daily. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual.

Viktor E. Frankl

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

Søren Kierkegaard

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.

Simone de Beauvoir

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

Susan Moody

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.

Oscar Wilde

When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated one's own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of them and turn it to one's own purpose and pierce through the murk, it became blunt and useless as a piece of cardboard.

Deborah Eisenberg

Deep down, it's all baseball, no matter what kind of geometrical shape you play it with.

Vernon D. Burns

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

Simone de Beauvoir

How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.

Albert Camus

CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that.

Samuel Beckett

If this had not been the case with Abraham, then perhaps he might have loved God but notbelieved; for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.

Søren Kierkegaard

Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live outside time. And when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don't get a chance to die.

Paul Auster

I am a mask, concealing the real.

Philip K Dick

Sleepless nightsSpent looking at the ceilingSearching in those etched patternsFor some sort of adhesiveTo glue together the broken piecesOf a soul crushedBy the weight of the fact thatLife is profoundly sad.

Justin Wetch

Fate is the cruelest of masters, takingLife when it pleases or at random, handingRigged decks to whom it pleases, cheatingAll alike and none the wiser, takingEverything away from those with nothing.

Justin Wetch

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

Albert Camus

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache.

Stanley Kubrick

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

Friedrich Nietzsche

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

Simone de Beauvoir

No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'--it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking...One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole--there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole...

Friedrich Nietzsche

In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god

Ali Shariati

I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.

Therese Doucet

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such. But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few... Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived! Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity. Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time. Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

Rollo May

There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four.

Albert Camus

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

Graham Greene

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.

Albert Camus

Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.

Jane Hamilton

One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!

Friedrich Nietzsche

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

Vladimir Nabokov

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.

Ernest Becker

But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.

Knut Hamsun

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Existentialism Quotes - Page 4

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