July 2010
96 posts
4 tags
“He who contemplates suicide should ask himself whether his action can be...”
– Fundamental Principles of The Metaphysic of Morals, Kant.
Kant argues that if a person chooses to commit suicide, that is using themselves as a means to satisfy themselves, but a person cannot be used “…merely as means, but must in all actions always be considered as an end in...
1 tag
Downloadable audio files (mp3 and other formats)... →
1 tag
“In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer.
4 tags
“The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing...”
– Sartre describing the position of Meursault, the protagonist of Camus’ L’Etranger who is condemned to death.
4 tags
“They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer (via notweekday)
For Camus, on the other hand, suicide was the rejection of freedom. He thinks that fleeing from the absurdity of reality into illusions, religion or death is not the way out. Instead of fleeing the absurd meaninglessness of life, we should embrace life...
1 tag
“The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer (via itsmaddiegoudie)
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer German Philosopher (via briiittany27)
“I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long...”
– Albert Camus, The Stranger (via earlyfrost) (via neonloneliness)
1 tag
“When you have thought deeply about mankind, whether because it’s your job or...”
– Albert Camus, The Fall (trans. R. Bass), 2006, Penguin, 31 (via tracesoftraces)
2 tags
“It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator...”
– Simone de Beauvoir, Toward a Hidden God published in Time, 1966
2.05 from Sonnets to Orpheus
Flower-flesh, unfolding bit by bit
this anemone in the meadow dawn,
until its loins are open to the light
of many sounds the loud sky gushes down;
muscle of infinate receptivity,
you flex within the silent flower-star,
at times so overwhelmed by superfluity
that the gentle beckoning and calm
of sunset can just barely realign
all these hyperextended petal edges:
determination of how...
1 tag
1 tag
“In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is...”
– Albert Camus (Submitted by stickyembraces)
1 tag
Quick Reminder: 5 days until entries for the...
more details can be found on the contests page.
1 tag
“We play the part of heroes because we’re cowards, the part of saints because...”
– Jean-Paul Sartre (via tameourways) (via senjensenjensen) (via jmek)
1 tag
“Oh, cursed be that arrogant satisfaction in standing alone.”
– Kierkegaard’s journal, 1838.
1 tag
“The fact is that it is very rare for the infantile world to maintain itself...”
– Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity: Section II: Personal Freedom and Others.
2 tags
“I’m aware of my tongue … It’s an awful feeling! Every now and then I...”
– Linus, Peanuts.
Schulz succinctly describes the horror of discovering one’s own existence in the world.
“What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
– Henry David Thoreau
1 tag
“…the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for...”
– Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
“Who can free himself from achievement, and from fame, descend and be lost, amid...”
– Chuang Tzu (via heartmindspirit)
“…man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose
flower and fruitage...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 tags
1 tag
1 tag
“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one...”
– Jean Paul Sartre (via gondorgirl)
1 tag
“We are the scapegoats, we are the conquered, the cowards, the vermin, the...”
– Iron in the Soul (Jean-Paul Sartre). (via coffee-spoons)
1 tag
“Even those of you who are of of my way of thinking will agree with me that...”
– Iron in the Soul (Sartre). (via coffee-spoons)
1 tag
A second of darkness, a little back curtain falls and goes back up, and your break is made. It keeps your eyeball moist and blots out the world. Think how restful it would be. A hundred rests in an hour. A hundred little escapes.
Huis Clos (No Exit) Jean Paul Sartre
(via sydneyrae)
“No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never...”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900-1944)
1 tag
“…Ultimately one is always to blame for one’s own fate; or at least innocently...”
– Zemlinsky, in a letter to Alma. (via musicophilia)
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
“Blanchot, like others of his generation, testifies to an experience of the...”
– Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, 2004, University of Chicago Press, 5 (via tracesoftraces)
“Who hasn’t asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be...”
– Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (Submitted by substitutescene)
“In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever...”
– Chuck Klosterman
2 tags
3 tags
“Primary absurdity manifests a cleavage, the cleavage between man’s aspirations...”
– Jean-paul Sartre on Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (via suspiria-de-profundis)
3 tags
“One the one hand, there is what we might generally call Objectivity, things that...”
– Robert C. Solomon, “Søren Kierkegaard - On Becoming a Christian” (via fear-and-trembling)
1 tag
2 tags
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If...
“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of...”
– Krzysztof Kieślowski (Submitted by jadabh)
Søren Kierkegaard - On Subjective Truth →
fear-and-trembling:
Famed Existentialist and Philosophy professor at my university (The University of Texas at Austin) Robert C. Solomon delivers an amazing lecture on subjective truth in the Kierkegaardian sense. You NEED to hear this.
1 tag
“Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness,...”
– John Givings (via chapter13)
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute...”
– Roald Dahl (b. September 13, 1916) (via savingpaper) (via libraryland) (via austinimus)
5 tags
