#existential

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere. ↗

— Robin Sloan

#life

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning. ↗

— Susan Moody

#life

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

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone. ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#secrets #marriage

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening ↗

— Zhuangzi

#existentialism #life #tao #taoism #death

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#student #teacher #teacher

When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist. ↗

— Noah Cicero

#pain #screaming #suffering #terrorism

I want my name to mean me. ↗

— Mark Haddon

#authority

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#americans #existential #people #art

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#plays #stoppard #dreams