#exist

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #meaning-of-life #nihilism #the-absurd #life

I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless journey. It was the tension between these two poles--a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other--that kept me going. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#fear #life

You only know of existence, once you rebel. You only know of life, once you die. ↗

— Lionel Suggs

#living #life

They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.' As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#life #meaning #life

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone. ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#secrets #marriage

You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist. ↗

— Neale Donald Walsch

#existence #live #death

It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole. ↗

— Dmitri Mendeleev

#discover #entire #entire universe #equal #equal measure

Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise. ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#art

It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#dreams #existence #existentialism #love #meaning

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#americans #existential #people #art