#existent

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? .....Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries...All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities… ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#freedom

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#philosophy #death

Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#existentialism #hell #solitude #humor

I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#existence #existentialism #friends #life #life-roles

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

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#existentialism #conformity

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. ↗