#existentialism

All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point? ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#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

To Vic and other kids his age, the past didn't exist except as a quick, oversimplified Wikipedia snippets, that ultimately didn't matter because they weren't now. Dolores wonders if that is all she really is, a little piece of now, relentlessly pushed forward by time, trying desperately to look back over her shoulder to see what the past could possibly tell her, but caught in a rush that refused to stand still long enough for her to hear what it had to say. ↗

— David Hontiveros

#age

As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred. ↗

— Albert Camus

#poetry #anger

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 road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. ↗

— Ernest Becker

#creativity #existentialism #humor #psychosis #art

All that is transitory is but a metaphor. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#existential #existentialism #life #metaphor #life

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. ↗

— David Eagleman

#existentialism #human-condition #life #memory #death

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