#existential

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

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us? ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#character #cornelia-funke #existentialism #words #writers

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#judgement #christ

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

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#jean-paul-sartre #language #the-plague #existentialism