April 2011
1 post
December 2010
2 posts
“Happiness is just a side-effect of purpose, a tag-a-long to the essence you create.”
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“We should heroically rebel against the abyss of meaninglessness and in that very act of defiance find some semblance of a reason for being.”
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November 2010
6 posts
“The existentialists argue that, of all the beings existing in the world, the human being is the only one that can decide what it should be; indeed, it is forced to do so since it has no fixed nature.”
—Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
—William James
“It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It’s always our decision who we are.”
—Robert C. Solomon, Waking Life
“Whatever capacities and traits I am born with, it is up to me to take them over and make something of them in what I do. Thus, whether aware of it or not, I am creating my own identity in my actions.”
—Charles Guignon, University of South Florida
“And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.”
—Ralph Ellison
“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization that everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
October 2010
10 posts
“The quest-ion of life’s meaning is the most urgent question of all.”
—Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
“Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.”
—Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“If people were more philosophical, to put it in a very routine way, they’d get their priorities straight, they’d realize that what they really want is respect, good neighbors, and so on. All philosophy is, when you think about it, is lifting yourself out of your immediate situation and asking yourself ‘what the hell am I doing?’”
—Robert C Solomon.
“We are, or should be, the philosophical country. Right? We are the country who was founded on ideas… the Declaration of Independence, the constitution… these are some of the greatest philosophical documents ever written. The founding fathers too, I mean, these were men, for the most part, who thought deeply and seriously about what life was all about.”
—Robert C. Solomon
“To be existential is to have those dark nights of the soul when the loneliness of existence becomes transparent and the structure of our confidence lies shattered around us. To be existential is to wrestle most fully with the jagged awareness of one’s own finitude, with the thunderbolt fact that I will die and that my death will be my own, experienced by no one else. To be existential is to recognize that in the face of all these somber truths, we must act…we must take responsibility for our lives; we must create the world anew.”
—George Cotkin, Existential America
“Becoming (existentially) authentic is first of all a matter of lucidly grasping the seriousness of your own existence as an individual - the raw fact of the ‘I exist’ - and facing up to the task of making something of your own life.”
—Charles Guignon, University of South Florida
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“The death anxiety of many people is fueled by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.”
—Irvin D. Yalom
“Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”
—Rollo May
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