"It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
6 fans of this quote   

"Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone."

Quincey, Thomas De on solitude
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"In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him."

Nietzsche, Friedrich on absurdity
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"Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on acceptance
25 fans of this quote   

"A man is a god in ruins."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on adversity
25 fans of this quote   

"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."

Mailer, Norman on drugs   

"We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life."

Renard, Jules on existence
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"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."

Ballard, J. G. on the future   

"It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite."

Kierkegaard, Søren on desire
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"There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming."

Kierkegaard, Søren on fear
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"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
16 fans of this quote   

"Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation."

Kierkegaard, Søren on deliberation
5 fans of this quote