#existential

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

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships. ↗

— David Ives

#always #existential #family #intense #intense love

There is scarcely any passion without struggle. ↗

— Albert Camus

#passion #struggle #passion

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him. ↗

— Rollo May

#love #love

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#philosophy #sartre #existentialism

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100. ↗

— Woody Allen

#humor #uncertainty #humor

Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#literary-fiction #sensual #love

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep. ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#allies #existentialism #love #madness #pain