Existential > Existential's Quotes

“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am ”
― Cooley, Inscriptions

“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Socrates

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.”
― Andrew Ryan

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]”
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

“Whoever appeals to the law against his fellow man is either a fool or a coward. Whoever cannot take care of himself without that law is both. For a wounded man shall say to his assailant, "If I Die, You are forgiven. If I Live, I will kill you." Such is the Rule of Honor.”
― Lamb Of God

“Money is precisely an object whose status depends on how we 'think' about it: if people no longer treat this piece of metal as money, if they no longer 'believe' in it as money, it no longer is money.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

“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”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger