All Quotes By Tag: Existentialism

“As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.”

“Death is a continuation of my life without me…”

“All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”

“And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn’t as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!”

“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.”