Alan, the first winter we knew him, stood at my desk in the Cathedral library and remarked, I think you and Hugh live more existentially than most people.I felt we'd made it: we, like Sartre and Camus...
One day about a month ago, I really hit bottom. You know, I just felt that in a Godless universe, I didn't want to go on living. Now I happen to own this rifle, which I loaded, believe it or not, and...
One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very most advantageous advantage which we have overlooked, which co...
The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with w...
The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
To seek out the upright. No fall butpreceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness,counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what?Something n...
There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.
People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
No drugs here, no manipulation of neurotransmitters that leaves our worldly problems unattended. And no talking cures because explicit insight is not needed. All that is required is courage: the coura...
As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they inevitably face an increasingly nagging question: Is this all there is? Childhood can be painful,...
... burdened with the unbearable weight of ourself.
I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes mas...
We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Our deaths will mean nothing to them.
Existence is tedious, anyway.
A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do...
It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.
J'ai envie de partir, de m'en aller quelque part où je serais vraiment à ma place, où je m'emboîterais... Mais ma place n'est nulle part; je suis de trop.
Perhaps it was because a terrible anguish had developed within my soul, occasioned by a circumstance which loomed infinitely larger than my own self: to be precise, it was the dawning conviction that...
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
Showing 141 to 160 of 207 results