#existent

Afternoon experience: autographing exposed legs, outstretched in lines like matchsticks. Afternoon epiphany: Those with smooth, hairless legs would soon lose all evidence of my contact when the sweat causes the ink from the marker to run. I am ephemeral. Skepticism would be the reaction to those with thick leg hair, as their curls frazzle the lines of my name outward illegibly. Among the scaly-legged, I flaked off immediately, like I never was at all. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#epiphany #existentialism #funny-and-random #legs #experience

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #death

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

#freedom #freedom

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened. ↗

— Archie Shepp

#culture #decade #existential #how #idea

I'd like to ask you more about your ears if I may," I said. "You want to ask whether or not my ears possess some special power?" I nodded. "See what I mean?" She said. She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light. "You are extraordinary." I said after catching my breath. "I know." she said. "These are my ears in their unblocked state." Several of the other customers were now turned our way, staring agape at her. The waiter who came over with more coffee couldn't pour properly. Not a soul uttered a word, only the reels on the tape deck kept slowly spinning. She retrieved a clove cigarette from her purse and put it to her lips. I hurriedly offered her a light with my lighter. "I want to sleep with you," She said. So we slept together. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#look-with-thine-ears #beauty

A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross. ↗

— Therese Doucet

#existentialism #faith #kierkegaard #philosophy #philosophy-of-religion

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought. ↗

— David Eagleman

#death #existentialism #human-nature #life #love

I'm trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through. ↗

— Sean Lennon

#existential #express #general #going #i

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible. ↗

— Paul Ricoeur

#anthropology #before #bible #decision #existential

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone. ↗

— Bill Moyers

#commitment #conveys #emotion #existential #experience