#existential

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us. ↗

— Tom Perrotta

#existentialism #life #death

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#continuity #descartes #existence #existentialism #experience

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#feminism #life

There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. ↗

— Walpola Rahula

#cogito-ergo-sum #existence #existentialism #god #humanity

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#amass #america #anyone #anyway #bad

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#clue #existential #feel #fill #going

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

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage. ↗

— Peggy Noonan

#between #choice #chose #despair #existential

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#experience

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