#existentialism

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#nihilism #philosophy #theology #elections

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be? ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#christianity #existentialism #nihilism #atheism

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. ↗

— Walker Percy

#existentialism #philosophy #age

All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point? ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#age

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#age

As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred. ↗

— Albert Camus

#poetry #anger

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. ↗

— Ernest Becker

#creativity #existentialism #humor #psychosis #art

All that is transitory is but a metaphor. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#existential #existentialism #life #metaphor #life

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#existentialism #faith #beauty