An Existential Life

"April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:05:51 -0400

“April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.”

- Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka (via delicateswans)

"Pitch-black winter nights live in my bones."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:25:44 -0400

“Pitch-black winter nights live in my bones.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, from Selected Letters (via violentwavesofemotion)

"My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 19:05:04 -0400

“My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.”

- Søren Kierkegaard (via apoetreflects)

"We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:42:50 -0400

“We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.”

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. (via ontheborderland)

Photo

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:00:08 -0400

"I don’t know if anybody else has this feeling. When you’re walking down the street and you catch..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:00:22 -0400

“I don’t know if anybody else has this feeling. When you’re walking down the street and you catch your reflection in something like a car window or a shop window and you see your face and you think, ‘Who’s that?’”

- Thom Yorke (via delicateswans)

toniiu: Winter Light dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1962

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:00:18 -0400

toniiu:

Winter Light dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1962

arnaia: Carl Sagan on humans (from The Sagan Series) [x]

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 09:01:21 -0400

arnaia:

Carl Sagan on humans (from The Sagan Series) [x]

Photo

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:11:48 -0400

"I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:00:13 -0400

“I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein - Letter to Bertrand Russell

"I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or..."

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 22:32:51 -0400

“I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow…Absent from other people’s meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings.”

- Julia Kristeva, “Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia” (via lovevoltaireusapart)

"Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost..."

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 11:00:28 -0400

“Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.”

- Anne Sexton (via howtotalktogirlsdialectically)

"Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 11:00:31 -0400

“Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it.”

- Franz Kafka, (via substantia-nigra)

"All were in a state of unrest and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone..."

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:30:09 -0400

“All were in a state of unrest and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone possessed the truth.”

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

"I ought to have… become a star in the sky. Instead of which I have remained stuck on earth."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 17:30:26 -0400

“I ought to have… become a star in the sky. Instead of which I have remained stuck on earth.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

englishmajorandcoffee: Kierkegaard is that you

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 12:00:10 -0400

englishmajorandcoffee:

Kierkegaard is that you

"The movement after the Second World War, which called itself existentialist and staged itself as an..."

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 23:21:00 -0400

“The movement after the Second World War, which called itself existentialist and staged itself as an avant-garde, had something powerless, something shadowy about it. Existentialism, which the German establishment suspects of being subversive, has a likeness to the beards of its followers. They costume themselves as oppositional, the youth as cave-people, who no longer play along with the swindle of culture, while they are really only donning the out of-fashion emblems of patriarchal dignity of their grandfathers.”

- Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (via anthropologeist)

phoenixdowns: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 12:00:14 -0400

phoenixdowns:

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You..."

Fri, 31 May 2013 12:00:10 -0400

“There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.”

- Franz Kafka (via pizzavanguard)

"You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 22:30:11 -0400

“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”

- Friedrich Nietzsche (via lola-a-soul-traveler)