#existentialism

...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." Obviously, I replied, they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it. I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me. ↗

— Albert Camus

#god #men

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#sartre #nature

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood. ↗

— Rollo May

#myth #contemporary

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

But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#existentialism #human-dignity #meaning #nihilism #usefulness

I rebel; therefore I exist. ↗

— Albert Camus

#rebel #existentialism

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#wisdom #writing #existentialism

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#existentialism #meaning #existentialism

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. ↗

— Ernest Becker

#existentialism