#existentialism

Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we? ↗

— Dave Eggers

#life

[Y]ou are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#existentialism #frustration #hell #life #wisdom

CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come? HAMM: Mine was always that. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#life

But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there. ↗

— Knut Hamsun

#life

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#existentialism #forever #heaven #paradise #present

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems. ↗

— David Eagleman

#empathy #existentialism #god #human #empathy

Without awareness, we are not truly alive. ↗

— James F.T. Bugental

#self-awareness #self-awareness

In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god ↗

— Ali Shariati

#school-of-thoughts #catholicism

I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk. ↗

— Libba Bray

#existentialism

Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes. ↗

— Phoebe Stone

#existential #loneliness #existentialism