Best 642 quotes in «existentialism quotes» category

In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice—he cherishes all these words, but exactly what do they represent? Sacrifice for what? Demand what sort of order? He doesn't know. If a value has lost its concrete content, what is left of it? A mere empty form; an imperative that goes unheeded and, all the more furious, demands to be heard and obeyed. The less Esch knows what he wants, the more furiously he wants it. Esch: the fanaticism of the era with no God. Because all values have hidden their faces, anything can be considered a value. Justice, order—Esch seeks them now in the trade union struggle, then in religion; today in police power, tomorrow in the mirage of America, where he dreams of emigrating. He could be a terrorist or a repentant terrorist turning in his comrades, or a party militant or a cult member a kamikaze prepared to sacrifice his life. All the passions rampaging through the bloody history of our time are taken up, unmasked, and terrifyingly displayed in Esch's modest adventure.

In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it.

In the silence, in the darkness of solitude, our thoughts become the monsters that torment us like little children in the night. I cannot tell myself this is a nightmare. O heaven high above me, how I wish…wish I were crazy, safe in some asylum, in a straightjacket…how I wish this were all made up like a terrible dream…all to be awoken from with the swallowing of a little red and green pill. But it is happening and no matter how hard I scratch and bite my flesh I will not wake up. Silence. Wer ist das? (The sound of breath, it takes me a minute to realize that it is mine own). Strange, but even then I do not know who that is.

In this Idea we find the expression of human interest (of wanting things to be the way one wishes them to be), rather than any clear exegesis into the ideal nature of the Idea. Things may very well be different. What one may signify may not be the same as another signifies (Saussure). We may hope that what we translate is the same idea, the same signification as the author intended, but we have no way of knowing to be sure, we are beyond that moment of signification and now in a moment of decision. There is no guarantee that what we choose is what the author intended (Derrida). We exist potentially only within a world of resemblances and relations; in actuality the originals lose themselves in the act. In this respect Post-Modernism is valid.

i once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow s foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization

I say, we live on, though I am wrong, this is what I say. In the past, present, future, we live on as if in one time. You can never stop the past from happening, and it has happened , and will continue to happen. This is the truth, I think I know, along with the two other things I do know. I exist. I want to kiss you. And also this: each day, as we go, we will always be as young as we can be.

I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.

I shall be here tomorrow, as I am every evening, and I’ll be pleased to accept your invitation.

Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.

I speak of the laws man has made, to make everyone lawful.

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.

I started out a human being. But pretty much had all the humanity wrung out of me after passing the Bar and practicing law for ten years. Not sure what I am now.

I spent most the day sleeping…or night…I feel a little better. I know that there should be no more walks outside. But really… I destroyed the tomb of shit. I dug the rat out and held its putrid body close to mine, and I cried, and as I cried I held tighter and tighter till the rat and me were one. And as I cried I whispered, ‘Don’t leave me Mommy! Don’t leave! Hold me please!’ And I almost thought I could hear her whispering back, from somewhere deep within my head. And as we held each other I forgot about all this crap I was buried in…I too was like this rat, we were both dead only I still awaited to be rescued from my grave of shit. But in this moment I was rescued by some long lost memory… A child’s joys. A child’s fears. Do we ever grow out of them?

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of God better than the visions themselves? Then you think, none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigarette and think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away, under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

Is this neuro-bot really supposed to be her, this creature, this thing, compiled of the ghosts of human data, the replicas of their past?

I tell the squad a joke: "Stop me if you're heard this. There was a Marine of nuts and bolts, half robot--weird but true--whose every move was cut from pain as though from stone. His stoney little hide had been crushed and broken. But he just laughed and said, 'I've been crushed and broken before.' And sure enough, he had the heart of a bear. His heart functioned for weeks after it had been diagnosed by doctors. His heart weighed half a pound. His heart pumped seven hundred thousand gallons of warm blood through one hundred thousand miles of veins, working hard--hard enough in twelve hours to lift one sixty-five ton boxcar one foot off the deck. He said. The world would not waste the heart of a bear, he said. On his clean blue pajamas many medals hung. He was a walking word of history, in the shop for a few repairs. He took it on the chin and was good. One night in Japan his life came out of his body--black--like a question mark. If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs perhaps you have misjudged the situation. Stop me if you've heard this...

I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

I thought of the opera ‘Madama Butterfly’ that I had just been listening to and saw myself as that sailor in that opera who was born into beauty but left it to chase his American dream. I had forgotten my heart, and the home in which it beat, and now as I held a life, tightly in my arms, in my eyes, that had wounded itself and was now about to die. Neglect. The burning furnace. I realized that I was never to see her, Life, again and that throughout the years when she had been there I hath forsaken thee lost in money, in opinion in short, an exchange in which we trade the means for the end (happiness), but never realize until the end how much we have truly lost and I. I was at the end of my road, or at least this road. Regret. But now was not the time. She was still here; breathing with the wind, beating against my face that licked with the cool, cool presence. There was still what was, what is, and for but a short time what was still to be. I had but a few moments to make up for an entire life that I had lost.

It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule— of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my light.

It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialectical consequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form of problemata , in order to see what a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming a murder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there where thinking leaves off.

It is possible that some people are sorry for me, but I am not aware of it.

I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

It's not enough to simply "be", what's required is to "be human".

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.

It was the first time I realized that I was going to die. I was drowning in the realization that this life was not going to last, that life was one day going to end, and as I began to suffocate in the fear of my own mortality, something happened, the days began to pass. I slowly began to forget in the constant flight of life the one thing that could set me free. My mind turned then to the first time I was in love. But was I really in love? For five whole years I had forgotten myself, my existence in the embrace of another. Love, the river Styx, and a toll we pay so we don’t wander wretchedly this earth in a lonely eternity, watching with remorse the fleeting happiness of others in union. Love, Narcissus, a stream where we fall in love not with another, but in the fact that the other loves us. Perhaps. Love, Fleeting fulfillment of which at the end lies Ceres, heads of a dog that will devour us and leave us stranded in the abyss with a thirst never quenched, but our throats always crying out, dry, for more and more and more. Ich liede Durst. So said Siddhartha. Immer. Toujours. Always And forever, ad infinitum. O Life thou pluckest me out. I guess it doesn’t matter though because, perhaps, that’s just life, and what is true is that for one eternal moment I was in joy…I was the blinking eye wide open which ever widened for more.

I view a piece ‘The Sick Child’ by Edward Munch. At the moment I view it I perceive the intended effect, a certain situation and the emotion it contains. The viewer’s reaction to this will depend on his or her own subjective experiences, that is, if he or she can relate, create a relation between what was (or is) and what is expressed. If he cannot he will walk away to the next painting with a strictly intellectual enjoyment of Munch’s work. If he can (and does) create a relation then the effect becomes affectual. The viewer’s memory activates, he sees the painting, he sees himself, and out of that comes the relation. He remembers what it (the situation, resemblance to situation) felt like and in that relation feels a bond with the painting, a connection. Art is relieving because it makes us feel that we have not been alone in what we have felt.

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

I was dead for a billion of years and in a few years I will be dead again. I'm not conscious of that state of lifelessness which was before I came to life. And I'm not sure about the lifelessness that is yet to come. Life is only a station between these two states. It is a chance to experience and to do something, the only chance known with certainty. The major issue is to find what is worth living for, but an even greater issue is to find what is worth dying for. We all die anyway.

I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this ‘master and proprietor’ is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.

It is amusing, is it not, to want to be both found and forgotten at the same time?

It is good to pray even if you do not believe in God.

It is our goal and new poetics to disappear. We will not disappear into nothingness; we will disappear into everything. As we resist and resist hard, history will remember us.

It is the mark of a common mind to think that everything is for him significant. In a respect he is right, in that moment everything (in terms of the intentionality of his or her consciousness) is significant. The mark of this type of man is that he never looks beyond the moment. If he did he would drown in the sea of insignificance, in the realization that what is, becomes was, and what was no longer has any significance (except for in relation), and what is, given enough time, becomes what was, that is, no more (hence the relation loses significance). If he could realize death he would realize [1.6. Death makes everything insignificant]. He would realize that he is no different than the countless number of people that have come and gone before him, who found their significance, much as he did, in bodily and social pleasures. He would realize this moment which has been given had for him its significance not in its primacy (in the moment itself) but rather in its secondary qualities, that is, the relations to those social and bodily pleasures which he has strived for, he would realize that the moment, which is most significant because it is primary (all else is secondary from it) had been forgotten, and that the life he had been living he had not been living at all. He would realize that what he had hitherto found significant was, given enough time, truly insignificant, and what had always seemed insignificant, the moment itself, was the most significant, simply because without it, there would be nothing. A man’s significance lies in truly living in his moment.

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

It’s maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.

It’s tragic that most of us spend our private lives paradoxically thinking something is watching us and permanently disapproving. We say we believe in benevolent deities but smear them with hate and the power to smite. We see sin everywhere, when the only sin is when we forget to treat each other with respect. That is the sad secret that makes the Universe vulnerable.

It was chance. A random series of events given meaning by somone desperate to prove there's a design to our lives. That the minutes and hours between our birth and death are ore than frantic moments of chaos. Because if that's all they are - if there are no rules governing our lives - then our entire existence is a meaningless farce.

It would be foolish to be stoical all the time, you'd wear yourself out for nothing

I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man's arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming. If I listen carefully, I can even hear the beating of his heart, so close are we. And perhaps even now, within that beat reverberates the beating of the great tide that is sweeping across the hundreds of miles of that far battlefield. Fate has for a brief and unexpected moment brought us together in this room, but beyond that it speaks no more.

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.

I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.

I’ve whittled my fascination with the cosmos down to this mantra: we can imagine the Universe as a giant void racing away from us at a frightening speed, or it could occur to us that, in fact, it is wrapped around us in all directions. Then, no matter where we are, we are at the centre of something wonderful. And that’s how I’ve always thought about it.

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.

I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.

I wish I could hold time in my hands. I wish I could talk to it. Oh, how I would ask it to give me just a few more increments of its elusive power. How can something we can’t touch or see have so much control over our lives. It was time that took you too soon, too young, before I got to say all of the things I wanted to, needed to. Things you will never know. And I carry them like a weight, these words, these sentences, right in the middle of my chest, because they have nowhere else to go. If only time had allowed me to understand the things I would want to say after you were gone. That’s the thing. They told me “don’t leave anything unsaid.” But I didn’t know what I wanted to say until it was too late, until you were gone. It was the time afterward that held all the wisdom.

I wasn’t good enough to forgive offenses, but eventually I always forgot them.