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Browsing Quotes With Tag: existentialism (5)

  • In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever “in and of itself.”

    Speaker: Chuck Klosterman
    Source: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
    Rating:
    1 (1 vote)
    Posted: 17 Sep 2009 at 5:03 PM
    Posted By: Puck
  • So many quests, all these different worlds… Can we all be so similar yet live in such disparate worlds? Is it possible that we are all sharing the same frenetic agitation, even though we have not sprung from the same earth or the same blood and do not share the same ambition?

    Speaker: Muriel Barbery
    Source: the Elegance of the Hedgehog
    Rating:
    1 (1 vote)
    Posted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:10 PM
    Posted By: Puck
  • Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! it carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the ever, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where – even though tomorrow we will die – we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring… We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art.

    Speaker: Muriel Barbery
    Source: the Elegance of the Hedgehog
    Rating:
    1 (1 vote)
    Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:04 AM
    Posted By: Puck
  • There’s so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature… yes, that’s it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are – vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth – and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

    Speaker: Muriel Barbery
    Source: the Elegance of the Hedgehog
    Rating:
    1 (1 vote)
    Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:50 AM
    Posted By: Puck
  • Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as though they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them – all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.

    Speaker: Muriel Barbery
    Source: the Elegance of the Hedgehog
    Rating:
    1 (1 vote)
    Posted: 23 Jun 2009 at 7:03 PM
    Posted By: Puck