#existential

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith ↗

— Ernest Becker

#god #religion #death

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small. ↗

— Paul Bowles

#humanity #life #life

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life? ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#life #love #precious-things #life

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. ↗

— R. D. Laing

#breakdown #death #enslavement #existential #liberation

All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point? ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#age

To Vic and other kids his age, the past didn't exist except as a quick, oversimplified Wikipedia snippets, that ultimately didn't matter because they weren't now. Dolores wonders if that is all she really is, a little piece of now, relentlessly pushed forward by time, trying desperately to look back over her shoulder to see what the past could possibly tell her, but caught in a rush that refused to stand still long enough for her to hear what it had to say. ↗

— David Hontiveros

#age

As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred. ↗

— Albert Camus

#poetry #anger

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#existentialism #faith #beauty

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. ↗

— David Eagleman

#existentialism #human-condition #life #memory #death

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#existentialism #socrates #death