#existentialism

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us? ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#character #cornelia-funke #existentialism #words #writers

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#judgement #christ

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#existentialism #maturity #youth #youth

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. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#dreams #existence #existentialism #love #meaning

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#plays #stoppard #dreams

And it's always better, isn't it, when you discover answers on your own? ↗

— Veronica Rossi

#guidance #inspirational #young-adult #inspirational

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home. ↗

— Kōbō Abe

#home #life #news #life

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies. ↗

— Rollo May

#beauty #existentialism #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

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