#existential

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be? ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#christianity #existentialism #nihilism #atheism

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#experience #funerals #i #interested #meaning

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 road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. ↗

— Ernest Becker

#creativity #existentialism #humor #psychosis #art

All that is transitory is but a metaphor. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#existential #existentialism #life #metaphor #life

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

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered. ↗

— Jim Holt

#philosophy #self #change

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

That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day. ↗

— Gregory Galloway

#existentialism #death