lets tumble our way through an existential crisis

"Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars."

Walter Kaufmann (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre)

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"The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed."

Søren Kierkegaard (The Sickness Unto Death) (via shynessisnice)

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Passing through, Simone de Beauvoir.

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"Angst, sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be the experience of our freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that “nothing is holding me back”, one senses the lack of anything that predetermines you to either throw yourself off or to stand still, and one experiences one’s own freedom."

Wikipedia: Existentialism, Angst

I think this happened today. It was kind of fun. (A lot better than if it had happened at night.)

(via brentgilliard)

and they say wikipedia isn’t a good source.

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Photographer: Codrin Lupei

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(via lolerature)

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"…existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men."

Jean Paul Sartre

Sartre’s view of existentialism places an incredible amount of responsibility on every person. It rejects the helplessness and complacency people feel when confronting the ways things are. No power enslaves us so successfully as our own attitude and lack of effort. We are always in a position to resist evil, and we must, if humanity is to represent anything meaningful at all.

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"In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence … and loathing seizes him."

Friedrich Nietzsche

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"As it is a comfort to seafarers to know that no matter on what strange water they may venture there are always pilots within call, so the edifying contemplation stands near the breakers and reefs of this life prepared by daily sight of terrible sufferings swiftly to render what little aid it can. Yet it cannot help in the way that a pilot helps the ship. The sufferer must help himself. But then neither shall he owe to this or to any other man what the seafarer owes to the pilot. Indeed if this sufferer like anyone else sincerely wills the Good, then he must be ready to suffer all"

Kierkegaard

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"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

e.e. cummings

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"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Vladimir Nabokov

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"We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes - one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way."

Christopher Hitchens

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"Did God create Man, or did Man create God?"

Nietzsche

This phrase is very frequently misinterpreted, more often than not to imply a rhetorical as opposed to empirical question. Nietzsche meant to leave the reader with much less of an elusive question, or to set a much more definable antecedent, so to say that humans are far more equipped than to instill blind faith any longer in an imperial cosmogony; now we take this statement to include the vast array of technological advancement which exists currently.

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"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him"

Nietzsche (Kaufmann, 105)

By this statement, he does not resort to a physical death, since there has never been a physical God, but instead the death of an ascribed morality, or outdated set of beliefs that were “etched in stone” regarding appropriate behavior, moral mental analysis (or “lack thereof”), and mythically orlegendarily “trained” responses.

(via shynessisnice)