#existential

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

Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute. ↗

— Stephen A. Diamond

#evil #existentialism #anger

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

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

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#existentialism #socrates #death

That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day. ↗

— Gregory Galloway

#existentialism #death