Existentialism Quotes - Page 9

• All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

  Tom Stoppard

  Eye, Nudge, Grotesque

  'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' (1967) act 1

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• 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

  Panic, Rewriting, Process

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• People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Drama, People, Scary

  Chuck Palahniuk (1999). “Survivor: A Novel”, Anchor

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• Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Believe, Men, Support

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Christopher Middleton (1996). “Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.7, Hackett Publishing

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• One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -

  Jack Kerouac

  Spiritual, Moving, Book

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• You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wish, Looks, Look Up

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• Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram's right, there's not one truth ever, just a bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It's all a beautiful calamitous mess. It's like the day Mr. James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, "That's it! That's it!" to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it.

  Jandy Nelson

  Beautiful, Philosophical, Heart

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• Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wall, Fabulous, Relation

  "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873.

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• There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Human Nature, There Is No God, Humans

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.164, Open Road Media

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• I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.

  Sergey Brin

  People, Mountain, Existential Angst

  "Google co-founder Sergey Brin wants more computers in schools" by Dan Fost, latimesblogs.latimes.com. October 28, 2009.

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• Struggle is what it means to be alive and free.

  David Budbill

  Struggle, Mean, Alive

  David Budbill (2012). “Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse”, p.43, Copper Canyon Press

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• I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Thinking, Knowing, Half

  "Portlandia Brings Out the Fan in Carrie Brownstein" by Scott Thill, www.wired.com. January 06, 2012.

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• Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Hate, Generations, Dry

  "The Flies". Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, Act 2, 1943.

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• Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

  Albert Camus

  Challenges, Age, Peculiar

  Albert Camus (1965). “Caligula and Cross purpose”

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• I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can't answer it without crying. I think, You're 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don't know the answer yet.

  Ellen Barkin

  Meaningful, Kids, Emotional

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• The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat.

  Preet Bharara

  Bells, Pearls, Next

  "Congress' Profound Failure on Cybersecurity". abcnews.go.com. August 11, 2012.

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• Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism. There is no particular religious tradition in my work. There is only one psychological assertion that I would insist upon. That is: the SELF takes precedence.

  Stanley Elkin

  Religious, Philosophy, Self

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• Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

  William Barrett

  Europe, Civilization, America

  William Barrett (2011). “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy”, p.14, Anchor

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