#existential

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

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

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

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. ↗

— Albert Camus

#war #death

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself. ↗

— Ernest Becker

#mental-health #death

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals. ↗

— Ernest Becker

#religion #death

In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#philosophy #dreams