#existentialism

When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist. ↗

— Noah Cicero

#pain #screaming #suffering #terrorism

I want my name to mean me. ↗

— Mark Haddon

#authority

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

And it's always better, isn't it, when you discover answers on your own? ↗

— Veronica Rossi

#guidance #inspirational #young-adult #inspirational

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home. ↗

— Kōbō Abe

#home #life #news #life

There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four. ↗

— Albert Camus

#death

Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#knowledge #life #philosophy #life

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#humor #life #pondering #humor

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules ↗

— Albert Camus

#morality #ethics

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#metaphysics #metaphysics