revisiting existentialism

Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? ...Ah, I see; it's life without a break. ~ Sartre

...here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing absolutely, no reason for existing. ~ Sartre

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. ~ Camus

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. ~ Camus

The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future. ~ Camus

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. ~ Camus

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. ~ Camus (sad but true :/)

The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. ~ Camus

A crowd—not this crowd or that, the crow now living or the crowd long deceased, a crowd of humble people or of superior people, or rich or of poor, etc.—a crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction. The Point of View ~ Kierkegaard

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it...but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill...If one just keeps on walking everything will be all right. ~ Kierkegaard

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars,for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still... The Stranger ~ Camus ( absolutely love this one and it is a MUST read book)

Without Music, life would be a mistake. ~ Nietzche

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night. ~ Nietzche

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. ~ Nietzche

When Zarathustra was alone...he said to his heart: 'Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead! ~ Nietzche

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond. ~ Kafka

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. ~ Kafka

To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility. ~ Kafka

A belief is like a guillotine just as heavy, just as light. ~ Kafka

My life is hesitation before birth. ~ Kafka (could not agree more)

Intercourse with human beings seduces one to self-contemplation. ~ Kafka