#existent

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

— Anton Chekhov

#metaphysics #metaphysics

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. ↗

— Rollo May

#myths #myth

Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be! ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#meaning-of-life #philosophy-literature #death

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening ↗

— Zhuangzi

#existentialism #life #tao #taoism #death

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

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#americans #existential #people #art

The true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the unhappiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection. ↗

— Ludwig Bemelmans

#comes #constantly #creatures #existent #finding

Nothingness haunts Being. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#existentialism

Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes." Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#life #philosophy #religion #art