356 quotes found
“A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chines...”
“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”
“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 relatio...”
“But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore,...”
“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household...”
“A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.”
“If this had not been the case with Abraham, then perhaps he might have loved God but notbelieved; for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upo...”
“Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live out...”
“Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?”
“Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.”
“And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.”
“Existentialism is commonly associated with Left-Bank Parisian cafes and the ‘family’ of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who gathered there in the years immediately following th...”
“When I was very young and in the cave of Trophonius I forgot to laugh. Then, when I got older, when I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven’t stopped since. I saw that...”
“It’s tragic that most of us spend our private lives paradoxically thinking something is watching us and permanently disapproving. We say we believe in benevolent deities but smear them with hate an...”
“Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with ...”
“My mother once said if you can’t handle the fact that your world-view might be entirely inaccurate, you are not worthy of believing in it.”
“Existentialism” is a thinkingThat no longer wishes to think; this means the destructionOf the true thinking that constitutes man.The existentialist fanaticsDislocate their brains for nothing — it i...”
“That's the existential problem," Fat said, "based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe's Faust, Part One, where Faust sa...”
“Well, that's not true. I need to work for a living.”“No, that's not true. You think you need to work like this because that's what you've been told. That is merely an idea put into your head. In ac...”
“Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpo...”
