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@existentialcoffeebreak
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think... and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment— it's frightful —if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
The thing which was waiting was on the alert, it has pounced on me, it flows through me, I am filled with it. It's nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist. I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
It is high time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary?"— and to comprehend that such judgements must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgements for all that! Or to speak more clearly and coarsely: synthetic judgements a priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgements. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (On the Prejudices of Philosophers; 11)
But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chessplayer, loves only the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (one cannot swear to it), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, or in other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which of course must always be two times two makes four, that is a formula, and after all, two times two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. ... Granted that man does nothing but seek that two times two makes four, that he sails the oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really find it — he is somehow afraid, I assure you. He feels that as soon as he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Part I; Chapter 9)
You see, gentlemen, reason, gentlemen, is an excellent thing, there is no disputing that, but reason is only reason and can only satisfy man's rational faculty, while will is a manifestation of all life, that is, of all human life including reason as well as all impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life nevertheless and not simply extracting square roots. ... Human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Part I; Chapter 8)
“How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?”
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
The more passionately something moves [one], and the more intimately it penetrates his being, the stronger is the urge also to glimpse its power outside himself in others, in order to prove to himself that he has encountered nothing other than what is human.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (Fourth Speech)
We are so involved in each other and the world that we cannot be content to view truth disinterestedly.
Rollo May, Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (Part I: Introduction; I The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology; Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud)
A man who can keep the different segments of his life entirely separated, who can punch the clock every day at exactly the same moment, whose actions are always predictable, who is never troubled by irrational urges or poetic visions, who indeed can manipulate himself the same way he would the machine whose levers he pulls, is of course the most profitable worker, not only on the assembly line but even on many of the higher levels of production. As Marx and Nietzsche pointed out, the corollary is likewise true: the very success of the industrial system, with its accumulation of money as a validation of personal worth entirely separate from the actual product of a man's hands, had a reciprocal depersonalizing and dehumanizing effect upon man in his relation to others and himself. It was against these dehumanizing tendencies to make man into a machine, to make him over in the image of the industrial system for which he labored, that the early existentialists fought so strongly.
Rollo May, Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (Part I: Introduction; I The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology; Compartmentalization and Inner Breakdown in the Nineteenth Century)
You yourself are a compendium of humanity.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (Second Speech)
The real work of the committed writer is ... to reveal, demonstrate, demystify, and dissolve myths and fetishes in a critical acid bath.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Purpose of Writing
An insane pride is necessary to write — you can only afford to be modest after you've sunk your pride into your work.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Purpose of Writing
“The ultimately self-destructive use of technology consists of employing it to fill the vacuum of our own diminished consciousness. And conversely, the ultimate challenge facing modern man is whether he can widen and deepen his own consciousness to fill the vacuum created by the fantastic increase of his technological power. It seem to me that, and not the outcome of a particular war, is the issue on which our survival hinges.”
— Rollo May, Psychology and the Human Dilemma (Part I: Our Contemporary Situation; Chapter 3: Personal Identity in an Anonymous World)
Man has merely stolen the feeling of his infinity and godlikeness, and as an unjust possession it cannot thrive for him if he is not also conscious of his limitedness, the contingency of his whole form, the silent disappearance of his whole existence in the immeasurable.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion (Second Speech)
All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its most proper intent if it has not previously clarified the meaning of Being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental cause.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (3. The ontological priority of the question of Being)
