Existentialism Quotes - Page 8

But Viv, if I've learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It's that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can't help themselves. They don't trust the world around them--it's too good for them, or not good enough--so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives up in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again. Your parents didn't like their creation myth, that's all--it had pain in it, and chaos, and their own parents were ashamed. So they told themselves a story that was at least partially true: about two good people who deserved happy lives. And probably at some point they started to believe that story. But the thing is, really, that it doesn't matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn't actually matter where we came from, or where we're going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we're here and how well we do it.

Katie Coyle

The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.

Friedrich Nietzsche

…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.

Darrell Calkins

Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.

Neel Burton

Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.

Neel Burton

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

Saul Bellow

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

Simone de Beauvoir

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth.

Hermann Hesse

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

Graham Greene

Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.

Johnny Rich

Max: Why do I get the feeling you’ve played god and you don’t know what you’ve created.Dr Hurstville: Hasn’t god done the same with us?

Jonathan K. Wade

You’re not interested in her because by your definition she isn’t real. But your brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s all just chemicals firing and testosterone giving you a hard-on.

Jonathan K. Wade

What is the point of our lives? There isn't any. I can't seem to decide how much horror and how much joy lies within that simple truth, but I know it is both of those things at once.

Ashly Lorenzana

You think it’s a game?Unintelligible? Ha!Envision no spoons.This is serious.It is a matter of joyversus emptiness.

Kristen Henderson

[W]hat we also see in sex is a kind of submissiveness. But not a kind of submissiveness which is simply 'do what you like, I'm just here for you', but it...is, or can be, very manipulative. It is a way of getting the other person to exercise all his or her efforts towards pleasing you, and in that way controlling what they're thinking, and in particular what they're thinking of you.

Robert C. Solomon

I decided to give up meaningless sex, but then I remembered that everything is meaningless.

Oli Anderson

Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

Elena Ferrante

Games are never over because you think them so! Which is why I like you. Are you doing what you want to do...or are you simply another piece of a darkened puzzle? Your own actions predetermined by powers higher than yourself?

LaTorre Mays

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

Albert Camus

Once you set the bar high for yourself, you cannot go back to mediocrity. You must give world-class performance in all that you do. Your work ethic, persistence, effort and dedication will glow on your behalf. Do not brag about your accomplishments; allow your reputation to speak of your magnificence.

Luis Enrique Cavazos

Don’t worry if you don’t accomplish everything in this life. Fortunately, death overcomes every thing—even the very thing that tried to kill us.

Kamand Kojouri

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

Albert Camus

The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the scene.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that huge, disorderly, anti-animal fantasy. What we call reason is no more than fantasy put into shape. Is there anything in the world more fantastic than that which is the most rational? Is there anything more fantastic than the mathematical point, and the infinite line, and, in general, all mathematics and all physics? Is there a more fantastic fancy than what we call "justice" and the other thing that we call "happiness"?

José Ortega y Gasset

When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.

Noah Cicero

Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.

Abhijit Naskar

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.

Czesław Miłosz

As a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature.

Elena Ferrante

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.

Clarice Lispector

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this ‘master and proprietor’ is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.

Milan Kundera

Living in the present moment is the recurring baptism of the soul, forever purifying every new day with a new you.

Alaric Hutchinson

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.

Simone de Beauvoir

The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.

Oscar Wilde

[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

Rollo May

Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.

Duncan McNaughton

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

Flannery O'Connor

Take fireflies for example. Try to imagine their beauty, the evanescent beauty of their lives, which don't even last a week.Female fireflies flash their lights only to have intercourse with the males; males twinkle just to have intercourse with the females. And once their mating has finished, they die. In short, their reproductive instinct is the single, absolute reason for fireflies to live. In that simple instinct and their simple world, no kind of sadness can intervene. This is precisely why fireflies are so fleetingly beautiful.

Tatsuhiko Takimoto

Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It’s a good sentence, she’ll like it.

Elena Ferrante

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

Rollo May

If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine. What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.

William Barrett

Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.

Iris Murdoch

(…) symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality…

Simone de Beauvoir

There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.

Jean-Paul Sartre

man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity

Paul Tillich

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

Simone de Beauvoir

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

Albert Camus

Empty Spaces I wanted to feel less.To not be burdened by emotion,To not feel sadness,To not know loss.I envied the inanimate,The trees that stand proudly in winter,Not missing their leaves.I wanted to be weightless,To not experience limitation.I didn’t want time to pass,The blur of days, months, years.It moved too quickly,I wanted to grasp on,Hold it.It eluded me,Intangible,Like light.I wanted to preserve life before you were gone.I didn’t want to know grief.But the pain kept me connected.It meant that I loved you,It meant that I would always be a little broken,It meant that our love filled all of the empty spaces.It meant that you would be with me... forever.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction

Bangambiki Habyarimana

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

Bangambiki Habyarimana

I know what is going on in the heart of an atheist. Deep anguish that there is nothing beyond, nothing to live for, nothing to give him hope. I know because I endured the same predicament.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

After losing faith, even an atheist feels a yawning void in his soul that needs filling; there is nothing imaginable that he can fill with it. It was all along meant to be filled with the sacred, with the unknown and unknowable power. That's the curse or blessing of humanity

Bangambiki Habyarimana

All religions are guesswork

Bangambiki Habyarimana

My gut instinct is that these heavens and hells exist nowhere else except in our hearts and minds

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Don’t curse the gods you will feel shame when you have to call on them for help

Bangambiki Habyarimana

God is powerful. Even those who claim not to believe in him fear him. Though their mouths may confess to disbelieve in him, their hearts yearn for him.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

All atheists will go to heaven. If god exists, not believing in him does not take him away and he cannot justly condemn those who seek him earnestly and cannot find him. He would even reward their earnest search for him.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

He is an atheist anyone who does not believe in my god and the wrath of god is upon him; I am in my right to meet that wrath on him," thunders the fanatic

Bangambiki Habyarimana

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Existentialism Quotes - Page 8

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