#existentialism

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why? ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#existentialism #realist #life

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. ↗

— Christian Smith

#human-nature #humanism #identity #personalism #personhood

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules ↗

— Albert Camus

#morality #ethics

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

I just look around and say, I'm a mess, I don't know why I do things ↗

— Mike Tyson

#funny #funny

I can't go on, I'll go on. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#drama #existentialism #fiction #humor #nihilism

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #feminism #philosophy #freedom

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

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep. ↗

— Andrew Sean Greer

#allies #existentialism #love #madness #pain