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Existentialist Quotes

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Existentialist Quotes

“Maybe there exists an inherent contradiction in our desires. Maybe this is the reason why we never feel contentment even after the fulfilment of our desires. Maybe we desire actually of a ‘continuous desire’ or persistence of a desire and not its ‘fulfilment’ as such.”

PhilosophyDesireContemplationExistentialismContradictionIntrospectionDualityEpistemologyMetaphysical QuotesExistentialist
Book:Memoir: The Cathartic Night
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“Dying with hopelessness is to die in despair. Hope is to know the certainty of uncertainness. It is not to quantify the uncertainness as this act itself is the act in despair, but it is to know the certainty of the existence of uncertainness. To know how certain is the ‘uncertain’. The temporality of existence is uncertain, and to know the certainty of that uncertainness is to know the inevitability of death.”

HopeFreedomDespairContemplationExistentialismContradictionIntrospectionEpistemologyMetaphysical QuotesExistentialist
Book:Memoir: The Cathartic Night
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“Just as the weak, despairing person is unwilling to hear anything about any consolation eternity has for him, so a person in such despair does not want to hear anything about it, either, but for a different reason: this very consolation would be his undoing; as a denunciation of all existence. Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author's writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error; perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production, and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No! I refuse to be erased! I will stand as a witness against you; a witness that you are a second-rate author.”

PhilosophyDespairExistentialistKierkegaardExistenitalismSøren Kierkegaard
Book:The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
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“A real existentialist pays attention to existence, not to existentialism. A real empiricist pays attention to the rightful use of empirical evidence, not to mere empiricism. A real humanist pays attention to a life of human substance, not to shallow theoretical concepts like humanism.”

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Book:Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World
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“This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.”

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Author:Milan Kundera
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“But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . .”

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Book:Life is Elsewhere
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“He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love. But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death.”

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Author:Milan Kundera
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“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”

RealityConsciousnessMetaphysicalDetachmentSelf PreservationSingularityEvent HorizonNeuronsVortexUtilitarianBurroughsExistentialistCollective UnconsciousWildfireSelf ImportanceQuantum RealitySurrealisticFree Verse PoetryJungianHuman ArroganceDispossessionJunk DnaDendritesParasitic SuperegoAxonsCollective Unconscious SubstrataLiving History Of ShadowsShadow VirusSource Virus
Book:Sinew of the Social Species
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“We are souls in the flesh specters caught between the limbo of yesterday and tomorrow illusions of the present imposters in these skins I am rain blown sideways by the wind My art, my love, my hunger slows the descent I spread out like a shadow on the pavement stomped on by what is, saved by what is not but is and is not are so fickle Reality and dreams dress up as one another playing musical chairs in the mind and if you are so lucky that a dream seizes the throne and turns your mind into an imagination, do not revolt, do not resist Become your madness Become the fool”

Self LoveMeaning Of LifeGrowth QuotesPassionate LivingCreativity QuotesJoyful Living QuotesExistentialistMadness QuotesIndividuality QuotesSelf Love Poems
Book:Become The Fool
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“Empty Spaces I wanted to feel less. To not be burdened by emotion, To not feel sadness, To not know loss. I envied the inanimate, The trees that stand proudly in winter, Not missing their leaves. I wanted to be weightless, To not experience limitation. I didn’t want time to pass, The blur of days, months, years. It moved too quickly, I wanted to grasp on, Hold it. It eluded me, Intangible, Like light. I wanted to preserve life before you were gone. I didn’t want to know grief. But the pain kept me connected. It meant that I loved you, It meant that I would always be a little broken, It meant that our love filled all of the empty spaces. It meant that you would be with me... forever.”

Life QuotesLove QuotesGriefPsychologyExistentialismLove HurtsGrief QuotesMissing SomeoneGrief InspirationalExistentialistSpirtual Life
Author:Jacqueline Simon Gunn
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“Whereas a belief in an absurd world arises out of the fundamental disharmony of a person searching for meaning in an apparently meaninglessness universe, an existential nihilist displays impassive intellectual stoicism towards their eventual mortality while embracing a passionate artistic commitment to munity against the underlying syndrome of insignificance and confusion encasing life.”

StoicismNihilismStoicExistentialistNihilistExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.”

MemoirWriters On WritingNihilismWriters QuotesMemoir WritingPersonal EssaysEssayistExistentialistNihilistExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Am I alone in an ensconced inner world where I obsessively worry about what happens to me, where the story of personal survival becomes the central theme of my shallow existence? I think not. Swaddled in our own brand of strangeness, we all struggle to come to terms with our demonstrated personal shortcomings. Our yearned-for life of living in pink skyways far removed from harm’s way is depressingly marked in contrast by our actual crabby existence spent scuttling along akin to a smug lobster, scrunched down on the asphalt streets, working in the city grid as frumpy members of the faceless mob.”

Meaning Of LifeAlienationExistential CrisisExistentialistExistential AngstMeaningful LivingExistential AnguishExistential QuestionsExistential Alienation
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Existentialist philosophy recognizes the existence of the individual as the real purpose of human life. The recognition is basically atheistic and it encourages the individual to free himself from the impositions of custom, governmental authority, economic pressures, and cultural inhibitions.”

HumansRealPhilosophyPurposeIndividualExistenceAtheismEconomicAuthorityPressurePositive AtheismRecognitionHuman LifeCustomsAtheisticInhibitionsImpositionExistentialist
Author:Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
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“Man never ceases to seek knowledge about the objects of his experiences, to understand their meaning for his existence and to react to them according to his understanding. Finally, out of the sum total of the meanings that he has deduced from his contacts with numerous single objects of his environment there grows a unified view of the world into which he finds himself "thrown" (to use an existentialist term again) and this view is of the third order.”

MenWorldUseOrderGrowsUnderstandingTermViewsExistenceEnvironmentAtheismObjectsThirdsPositive AtheismCeaseContactThrownUnifiedExistentialist
Author:Paul Watzlawick
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“In my formative years the people who influenced me most were the Christian existentialists, I mean men like Munier and Kierkegaard and perhaps most of all Nicholas Berdyaev and in my travels I looked for one thing more than anything. I rarely discussed, probably mainly because of language difficulties, metaphysics with the various religious people of other groups I'd meet with. But I'd very much try to see how they were incarnated, how their particular soul was incarnated or took roots into reality.”

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Author:Pierre Trudeau
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“Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with [Pablo] Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on.”

PeopleKnowsLooksWholeGuySufferingStuffCompanyMiseryDemonPretendingNow And ThenOther GuysExistentialist
Author:Paul Laffoley
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“I was keen to dispel a familiar misunderstanding: that existentialists somehow relish the alienation of human beings from the world. This may have been Camus's attitude, but it was certainly not that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, each of whom tried to show that we can only experience the world in relation to our own projects and purposes. The world is initially one of 'equipment', said Heidegger: it is a world of 'tasks', said Sartre.”

WorldHumansMayHas BeensSaidShowsPurposeHuman BeingsAttitudeProjectsTasksRelationFamiliarEquipmentMisunderstandingAlienationRelishExistentialistHeidegger
Author:David E. Cooper
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“I rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term, but as used by some existentialists, it nicely captures what Nietzsche admired - the resolve of an individual person to forge his or her own 'table of values', to be emancipated from strait-jacketing conventions, traditions, and ideologies. As embodied in the 'Overman', authenticity is the antidote to 'bad' nihilism.”

ShouldKindPersonsUsedValuesIndividualTermIdealsTraditionTablesAuthenticityIdeologyResolveConceptionCaptureConventionsAntidoteNihilismCultivatingExistentialist
Author:David E. Cooper
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“[M]an is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.”

ThinkingMenWorldBelieveDoeCertainPassionResponsibleAgreeExcuseThrownSweepingExistentialist
Book:The Philosophy of Existentialism: Selected Essays
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“I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment.”

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Author:Jean-Paul Sartre
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“What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.”

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Book:The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism
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“A minimal level of sportsman ethics afield is mandated by written law. Beyond that, say, when an action is legal but ethically questionable, or when (as Aldo Leopold long ago pointed out) no one is watching, hunter ethics is an individual responsibility. As the existentialists would have it, we determine our own honor minute by minute, action by action, one decision at a time.”

LongActionLawIndividualDecisionLevelsResponsibilityWrittenMinutesHonorEthicsDetermineLong AgoHuntersQuestionableSportsmanIndividual ResponsibilityExistentialist
Author:David Petersen
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