#existent

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#existentialism #life

Having just enough life to enjoy being dead. ↗

— Jim Holt

#nirvana #philosophy #life

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. ↗

— Miguel de Unamuno

#philosophy #life

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#student #teacher #teacher

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

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. Envy him; in his two-fold security. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#plays #stoppard #dreams

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#jean-paul-sartre #language #the-plague #existentialism

You don't have to stay anywhere forever. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#existentialism

Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été. ↗

— Albert Camus

#hope #philosophy #existentialism

She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.' 'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#existential #happiness #love #faith