#existential

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form. ↗

— Graham Greene

#life

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. ↗

— Walker Percy

#existentialism #philosophy #age

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#truths #age

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#age

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

Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat. ↗

— José Saramago

#existentialism #human #human-condition #life #religion

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead. ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#existentialism #imagination #knowing-someone #knowledge #love

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine. ↗

— James Baldwin

#existential #death