All Quotes By Tag: Existentialism

“Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.”

“It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.”

“Our greatest challenge today…is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.”

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”

“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.”

“A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’re married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that’s why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he’s dead.”

“Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!One thing at least is certain – This Life flies;One thing is certain and the rest is Lies -The Flower that once has blown forever dies.”

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”

“Anxiety, trauma and crisis are necessary catalysts to stimulate self-consciousness.”

“We have started the journey- no turning back now. Three steps lie between us and the goal:(1) Know who you are.(2) Know what you need.(3) Get it.These steps need to be taken in sequence. I cannot know what I need before I know who I am. I cannot go after what I need before I know what I need.”

“Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”

“[Y]ou are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.”

“If you want good luck; you must go out there and search for that luck!! Because luck is waiting for you to look for it.”