#existentialism
82 quotes
“A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir,”
“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth”
“But presently I began to bubble with happiness. No, my daughters' absence did not sadden me at all”
“What is an adult? A child puffed with age. The Woman Destroyed [ La Femme rompue ]”
“It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself... It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do”
“Une Mort Très Douce (1964) translated by Patrick O'Brian as A Very Easy Death (1965) last words”
“Il n'y a pas de mort naturelle: rien de ce qui arrive à l'homme n'est jamais naturel puisque sa présence met le monde en question. Tous les hommes sont mortels: mais pour chaque homme sa mort est un accident et, même s'il la connaît et y consent, une violence indue. There is no such thing as a natural death : nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die; but for every man his death is an accident and even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
“The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion. On her work All Men are Mortal in Force of Circumstances (1963), p. 73”
“His personal prestige, his qualities, his competence assure him a preponderant role however; since 1927 he has been above all the unchallenged specialist on peasant question. But the power he exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelt 's was. New China's Constitution renders impossible the concentration of authority in one man's hands; the country is governed by a team whose members have been united through a long common struggle and by a close friendship. On Mao Zedong , in The Long March . World Publishing Company. 1958. p. 427.”
“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom . The Blood of Others [ Le sang des autres ]”
“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves. 17 January 1837”
“There is a contrast of primary significance between Augustine and Pelagius. The former crushes everything in order to rebuild it again. The other addresses himself to man as he is. The first system, therefore, in respect to Christianity, falls into three stages: creation”
“One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas? Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular. Journals A 126”
“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul ; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away”
“in order to see and observe,”
“How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate. (Dialectic”
“It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat”
“What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought.”
“It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution? Journal entry, August 1, 1835”
“The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can”
“ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize”
“Introduction to Metaphysics”
“This Europe , which in its ruinous blindness is forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same: the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man...”
“What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities. Introduction to Metaphysics”
“cur aliquid potius extiterit quam nihil .”
“What is Metaphysics? (1929), p. 110”
“Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? Das ist die Frage. Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question.”
“Transcendence constitutes selfhood. Essence of Ground”
“The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous. The Essence of Truth, 1931”
“( Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte”
“What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal.... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space. On Alberto Giacometti 's work, Situations , in Braziller”
“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words. Refusing the Nobel Prize , New York Times”
“Marxism and Subjectivity”
“Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,”
“To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good , and nothing can be good for us without being good for all. Existentialism and Human Emotions”
“Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind. Existentialism and Human Emotions”
“On the Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ,”
“He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well”
“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason )”
“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom . L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique )”
“In the end, people will judge you by your actions, not by your intentions.”
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
“The soul is healed by being with children.”
“Man is what he believes.”
“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth. The Brothers Karamazov (1880)”
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. Crime and Punishment (1866)”
“Fyodor Dostoyevsky”
“Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it. Letter to Lou Andreas”
“You have committed one of the greatest stupidities”
“I've seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Förster has not yet severed his connection with the anti”
“So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine. Letter to Carl Fuchs”
“I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise. Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, cited in Karl Jaspers , Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p. 46”
“But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been”
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
“there are only facts,”
“Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 1865”
“I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor , and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza : that I should have turned to him just now , was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine”
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. Letter to Max Brod (1922)”
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired”
“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old”
“Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. The Zürau Aphorisms (1918)”
“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for man. The Zürau Aphorisms (1918)”
“In the fight between you and the world, back the world. The Zürau Aphorisms (1918)”
“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable”
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self”
“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness”
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Letter to Oskar Pollak (1904)”
“Death is something we should not fear because, while we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not.”
“My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open on far-off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence.”
“One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right”
“Toute idée fausse finit dans le sang, mais il s'agit toujours du sang des autres. C'est ce qui explique que certains de nos philosophes se sentent à l'aise pour dire n'importe quoi. Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything. Actuelles I, 1950”
“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world. "Helen's Exile"”
“We turn our backs on nature ; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink. "Helen's Exile"”
“We have exiled beauty ; the Greeks took up arms for her. "Helen's Exile"”
“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this? Said at the Dominican Monastery of Latour”
“It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming”
“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist. Review of Nausea by Jean”
“Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d'abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage. We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love”
“He is going to pay his debt to society ,”