Emily > Emily's Quotes

“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.”
― Albert Camus

“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“And it's always better, isn't it, when you discover answers on your own?”
― Veronica Rossi, Under the Never Sky

“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays

“The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Nothingness haunts Being.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.”
― Wodehouse

“Uncertainty is the normal state.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“To choose not to choose is still a choice for which you alone are responsible.”
― Gary Cox, How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses

“When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
― Rollo May, Existence

“It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”
― Rollo May

“It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty

“It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth

“Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?”
― Bertrand Russell

“Wouldn’t the joys of life lose all colour, if life was eternal?”
― Constantina Maud, Hydranos

“If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

“Afternoon experience: autographing exposed legs, outstretched in lines like matchsticks.

Afternoon epiphany: Those with smooth, hairless legs would soon lose all evidence of my contact when the sweat causes the ink from the marker to run. I am ephemeral. Skepticism would be the reaction to those with thick leg hair, as their curls frazzle the lines of my name outward illegibly. Among the scaly-legged, I flaked off immediately, like I never was at all.”
― Benson Bruno, A Story that Talks About Talking is Like Chatter to Chattering Teeth, and Every Set of Dentures can Attest to the Fact that No . . .

“Perhaps the Creator of this strange place knows us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps humanity was meant to eternally ponder the purpose and importance of our own existence. If we were assured of either, we’d be intolerable creatures.”
― Tiffany Madison

“if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'--it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking...One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole--there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader

“Without awareness, we are not truly alive.”
― James F. T. Bugental

“Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.”
― Jane Hamilton, The Book of Ruth