All Quotes By Tag: Existential

“If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he’ll never see anything.”

“We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.”

“We believe because it gives us faith. It gives us the willingness to go through our day, to keep the existentialist threat of meaninglessness away. We believe because we crave to be seen, to be known, to be understood. We believe because that is the only thing we can do. If there is no one to judge us – to tell us that we are good, and that if we are bad, we can be redeemed – why bother living at all? Why bother being good at all? If there is no one to look after us, and we are truly alone in this universe, what purpose do we have? We have nothing but the present moment, and only temporariness.”

“…and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.”

“I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it–it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

“She laughed. ‘It won’t last. Nothing lasts. But I’m happy now.”Happy,’ I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception–especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”

“We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.”