Quotes About Existentialism

You don't need the iPhone: you have the most exquisite apparatus in the known universe sitting right in your head - the most complex organization of matter in the entire universe. And here are we, feeling a little depressed, feeling like we're not getting where we need to be, when really you might be exactly where you need to be.

The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.

Taking the car out of the rental parking lot, almost getting fender-bendered by the guy in the BMW speaking capitalist Cro-Magnon into his cell phone; wondering whether the time has come to get a gun; already starting to look forward to my lethal injection—

For life is its own purpose and doesn't need a reason to be. That is its beauty.

Jeg har tit nok været bange for livet, men aldrig døden.

Hän katsoi jasmiinipensasta, jossa paljaat oksat olivat huolimattomasti sikin sokin, ja ajatteli kauhistuneena: Se on huollut. Koko maailma on kuollut minun nukkuessani. Tämä maailma kuuuluu jollekin toiselle, jota minä en tunne. Ehkä Mörölle. Tätä ei ole luotu muumipeikkojen asuinpaikaksi.

If Tolstoy were alive today and working at Panopticon Insurance, he'd say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity (70).

One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing...

insight," and the "message" of his books (which is no message at all) is similar to Gogol's in Nabokov's summary: "Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in petty pursuits that seem to them very important, while an

If you know the why, you can live any how.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

Like I don't know the first thing about how to be simply grateful that I'm alive. Maybe that's what's missing in our generation. Maybe we just feel too safe, too secure. We have too much stuff and no threat of any of it disappearing anytime soon.

Nude descending a staircase headless, not knowing where she is going but brave because all dreams lack conclusions and she is not enlisted to an ending.

Like the origin stories of Confucianism or early Buddhism, the modern story is about a universe that just is. Any sense of meaning comes not from the universe, but from us humans. "What's the meaning of the universe?" asked Joseph Campbell, a scholar of myth and religion. "What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there, that's it, and your own meaning is that you're there."3

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing, but Nothing , an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.

T]he worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn't even aware he's a nihilist.

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

Te diré que Dios parece tener un estilo de dirección técnica que a mí no me gusta nada. Yo soy bastante antimuerte. Y Dios da toda la impresión de ser bastante pro-muerte. No sé cómo nos vamos a poner de acuerdo al respecto él y yo, Bubú.

there was actually nothing, and /you/ were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn't function.

Tiene que ver con llegar a los treinta años, o incluso a los cincuenta, sin querer pegarte un tiro en la cabeza.

I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.