#existential

They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.' As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#life #meaning #life

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#student #teacher #teacher

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world. ↗

— Raymond Carver

#gazebo #pessimism #pessimism

I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb. ↗

— Sergey Brin

#angst #climb #enormous #existential #feel

Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes." Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#life #philosophy #religion #art

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #philosophy #equality

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

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'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

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