#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

I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#existence #existentialism #friends #life #life-roles

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment... ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#existentialist #nausea #men

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#existentialism #maturity #youth #youth

It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#dreams #existence #existentialism #love #meaning

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

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #honesty #seeking #truth #desire

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

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#existentialism #conformity

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