September 2010
42 posts
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August 2010
84 posts
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“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
– Franz Kafka (via ashipwreck)
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“This very heart which is mine will for ever remain indefinable to me. Between...”
– Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus (page 24) (via looklikerain)
“The human condition being what it is, with man small, helpless, insecure, and...”
– Martin Esslin, Kepos 345.
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Endgame by Samuel Beckett.
NELL: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But-
NAGG(shocked): Oh!
NELL: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh anymore.
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“Nothing is more real than Nothing.”
– Samuel Beckett
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“Why are we here, that is the question… In this immense confusion one thing alone...”
– Samuel Beckett (via daisyeyedgirl)
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“And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that’s not like me, but, how shall...”
– Molloy, Samuel Beckett (via cbaralis)
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“I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an...”
– Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
(Submitted by anderalexander)
“We hate the criminal and deal with him severely, because we view in his deed, in...”
– Sigmund Freud (via delicatelybruised)
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“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought… which can never be...”
– F. Dostoevsky, “The Idiot” (via mymetanoia) (via petitessedespassions)
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“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions....”
– Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (via andrealessi)
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“It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“‘Perhaps it’s inevitable; perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at...”
– The age of reason - Jean-Paul Sartre. (via petitessedespassions)
Reid: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Rossi: [whispers] Don’t. Reid: : Two. One to change the light bulb, and one to observe how it symbolizes an incandescent beacon of subjectivity in another world of cosmic nothingness. Prof Rothchild: An existentialist would never change the bulb, he would allow the darkness to exist. Reid: [realizes] Yeah,...
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“I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here. I am the one who...”
– Sartre, Nausea (Submitted by phantomother)
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Roquentin describing existence
”[…]a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the others. In the way: it was the only relationship between these trees, these gates, these stones.…In the way, the chestnut tree there, … And I—soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal...
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“This moment. It is quite round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I...”
– Ivich in “The age of reason” by Jean Paul Sartre (via petitessedespassions)
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” ‘A life, thought Mathieu ‘is formed from the future just as bodies are compounded from the void.’ He bent this head: he thought of his own life. The future had made way into his heart, where everything was in process and suspense. The far-off days of childhood, the day when he had said: ‘I will be free’: the day when he had said: -‘I will be famous’: appeared to him even now with their...
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“ “By my honor friend,” answered Zarathustra, “all that of which you speak does...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (via db183)
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Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown out into the void and into the icy breath of solitude. Today you are still suffering from the many, being one: today your courage and your hopes are still whole. But the time will come when solitude will make you weary, when your pride will double up, and your courage gnash its teeth. And you will cry, I...
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on enjoying and suffering the passions.
May your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names: and if you must speak of her, then do not be ashamed to stammer of her. Then speak and stammer, This is my good; this I love; it pleases me wholly; thus alone do I want the good. I do not want it as divine law; I do not want it as human statute and need: it shall not be a signpost for me to overearths and paradises. It is an earthly...
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“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”
– Franz Kafka (via ausdemleben47)
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“The absurd has meaning in so far as it is not agreed to.”
– The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (via isavoid)
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“I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature...”
– Oscar Wilde (via saturday-night-hemorrhagic-fever, andwewhisper)
“‘In reality, and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds...”
– Jean Paul Sartre
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“Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last...”
– Polybius on Scipio Aemilianus, Consul of Rome and conqueror of Carthage, Fall of Carthage (submitted by pyrrhosrepublic)
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“A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre (via everythingicantsay)
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WWII and Jean Paul Sartre
On June 22nd, Marshal Pétain concluded an armistice with the Germans. Under the terms of the armistice, France was split in two. The German ran the territory they had occupied during their invasion. Pétain, with his National Assembly government based in Vichy, ran the other half in preparation for when Germany would fully occupy France – this was scheduled for November 1942. On July 10th 1940, the...
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“Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself, that is the summary of...”
– Dostoyevsky ”The Possessed” (1872)
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“I know God is necessary and must exist. I also know that he does not and cannot...”
– Dostoyevsky “The Possessed” (1872)
for Kirilov this realization alone is sufficient reason to kill oneself.
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“If God does not exist, I am God.”
– Dostoevsky ”The Possessed” (1872)
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Suicide and Living
suicide settles the absurd by agreeing to it.
living is experiencing the absurd fully but without reconciliation.
not being reconciled with the absurd doesn’t free one of it but serves to disqualify suicide from the genuine absurd experience of living.
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“Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind...”
– Sartre, from Nausea (Submitted by phantomother)
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“Kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”
– Marquis de Sade’s Last Will and Testament.
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“There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for man, as long as he remains...”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov (trans. R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky), 2004, Vintage, 254 (via tracesoftraces)
“It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite- only a sense of...”
– Thoreau
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“It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair....”
– Charles Baudelaire (via billyjane)
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“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties,...”
– Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2.
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