Bertrand Russell  - Quotes

 Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument.  

Tags: continuity   descartes   existence   existentialism   experience   self   thought   uncertainty     


Tom Stoppard  - Quotes

 A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. 

Tags: existentialism   plays   stoppard     
Werner Herzog  - Quotes

 In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel. 

Tags: existentialism     


Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe  - Quotes

 All that is transitory is but a metaphor. 

Tags: everything   existential   existentialism   life   metaphor     
Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough 

Tags: afterlife   atheism   debate   ethics   existence   existentialism   faith   life   materialism   morality   naturalism   religion   respect   supernaturalism     
Simone de Beauvoir  - Quotes

 The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her. 

Tags: aloneness   death   existentialism     
Philip K. Dick  - Quotes

 A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. 

Tags: despair   existentialism   future   hopelessness     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 convictions might be more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies. 

Tags: convictions   existentialism   lies   truth     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 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... 

Tags: existentialism     
Albert Camus  - Quotes

 I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. 

Tags: existentialism   happiness   perspective   philosophy   purpose   sisyphus     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. 

Tags: existentialism   student   teacher     
Albert Camus  - Quotes

 On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness. 

Tags: camus   existentialism   goodness   ignorance     
Albert Camus  - Quotes

 There is scarcely any passion without struggle. 

Tags: existentialism   passion   struggle     
Umberto Eco  - Quotes

 I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. 

Tags: existentialism     
Cornelia Funke  - Quotes

 Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us? 

Tags: books   character   existentialism   words   writers   writing     
Samuel Beckett  - Quotes

 I can't go on, I'll go on. 

Tags: absurdity   drama   existentialism   fiction   humor   nihilism   tragedy     
Betty Friedan  - Quotes

 Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all? 

Rollo May  - Quotes

 Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own 

Tags: conviction   existentialism   morality     
Graham Greene  - Quotes

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

Tags: existentialism     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. 

Tags: conformity   existentialism     
Fernando Pessoa  - Quotes

 Arre, estou farto de semideuses!

Onde
 

Tags: existentialism     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way. 

Tags: existentialism   judgement     
Simone de Beauvoir  - Quotes

 Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. 

Tags: existentialism   feminism   philosophy     
Raymond Carver  - Quotes

 This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world. 

Tags: existentialism   gazebo   pessimism     
Simone de Beauvoir  - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: ambiguity   existentialism   philosophers     
Rollo May  - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: existentialism   myth   symbol     
Albert Camus  - Quotes

 Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai d 

Tags: existentialism   hope   philosophy     
Jean-Paul Sartre  - Quotes

 Il n'y a de r 

Tags: action   existentialism   handeln   inspirational   philosophy   reality   sartre     
Rollo May  - Quotes

 It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths. 

Tags: existentialism   myth   science     
P.G. Wodehouse  - Quotes

 I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. 

Tags: existentialism   humor   life   pondering     
Fyodor Dostoevsky  - Quotes

 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:
 

Tags: dostoevsky   existentialism   idiot     
Rollo May  - Quotes

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

Tags: existentialism   myth     
Rollo May  - Quotes

 A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. 

Tags: existentialism   myths     
Albert Camus  - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: existentialism     
Deborah Eisenberg  - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: cardboard   existentialism   knives     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: existentialism   truths     
James Baldwin  - Quotes

 I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.



I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
 

Tags: death   existential     
Philip K. Dick  - Quotes

 Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design. 

Tags: existentialism   hippies   sandwiches     
Jean-Paul Sartre  - Quotes

 I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,

and I have followed the source of rivers towards their

source or plunged into forests, always making for other

cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and

I could never turn back any more than a record can spin

in reverse. And all that was leading me where ?

To this very moment...
 

Tags: existentialism   existentialist   nausea   sartre     
Jean Paul Sartre  - Quotes

 Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. 

Tags: existentialism     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgements! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither doe sit know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress... 

Tags: existentialism   universe     
Adam Grossberg  - Quotes

 Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I 

Tags: existentialism   life   philosophy   wisdom     
Neil Gaiman  - Quotes

 You don't have to stay anywhere forever. 

Tags: existential     
J.G. Ballard  - Quotes

 Strangman shrugged theatrically.  

Tags: ambivalence   existentialism   suicide     
Jean-Paul Sartre  - Quotes

 In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations. 

Tags: existentialism   philosophy     


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