#existential

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual. ↗

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

#dissent #existential #individual #right #rightful

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

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

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all. ↗

— Rose Tremain

#enjoyable #existential #novel #panic #process

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it. ↗

— Steven Wright

#here #i #map #over #over it

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #philosophy #equality

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us. ↗

— Tom Perrotta

#existentialism #life #death

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#continuity #descartes #existence #existentialism #experience

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. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#feminism #life

There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. ↗

— Walpola Rahula

#cogito-ergo-sum #existence #existentialism #god #humanity