#existential

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

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

Nothingness haunts Being. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#existentialism

She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.' 'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#existential #happiness #love #faith

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #philosophy #the-fall #death

I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb. ↗

— Sergey Brin

#angst #climb #enormous #existential #feel

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual. ↗

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

#dissent #existential #individual #right #rightful

Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes." Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#life #philosophy #religion #art

There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four. ↗

— Albert Camus

#death

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all. ↗

— Rose Tremain

#enjoyable #existential #novel #panic #process