#existential
Explore Books, Authors and Common Highlights on Existential
Showing 100 of 141 highlights
In the pursuit of the divine, we find ourselves.
From A History of God by Karen Armstrong
One must imagine Sisyphus as a happy man.
From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Without music, life would be a mistake.
I felt like I was disappearing.
From The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything without it.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
The ambiguity of being is the source of all our dilemmas.
The search for God is the search for meaning.
From God: A Human History by Reza Aslan
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
The ambiguous nature of man reveals itself in the fact that he is both the subject and the object of his own action.
Rebellion is the struggle of being human.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
Freedom is not a given; it is something we must achieve.
The greatest problem of our time is the search for meaning.
The ambiguity of our situation is what makes us human.
Hell is other people.
We’re all just a bunch of cells, and it’s all going to end up in the ground.
From Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
The act of dying is one of the acts of life.
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
From The Stranger by Albert Camus
Mystery is more important than certainty.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Life is a series of moments, a series of choices.
Life is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
From Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
We are the first generation in the history of humanity that has the power to destroy our planet.
From The Future of Humanity by Michio Kaku
To will oneself free is to negate the other.
The only way to deal with the absurd is to embrace it.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming—that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger, it would be easy to live.
From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Time is different in the sacred realm.
A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy.
We must choose ourselves.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
To be happy, we must not be too happy.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.
Apathy towards religion can lead to a loss of meaning.
From The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong
Freedom is not only what we do, but also how we think.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
Choice is the essence of what it means to be human.
We are condemned to be free.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Authentic existence involves confronting our own mortality.
From Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
I have no idea what I want to do with my life.
From Open by Andre Agassi
The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
From The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
We must choose ourselves; once we have chosen we are responsible for ourselves.
We must choose ourselves, as we are the ones responsible for our own existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
From The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
The modern world requires us to construct our own meaning.
From Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton
True faith requires the courage to live without certainty.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
All life is problem solving.
Life is a dream and we are the dreamers.
From The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Religious traditions emerged not to offer answers but to provide frameworks for understanding our existence.
When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.
From The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The essence of life is to search for meaning.
From Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
From Cosmos by Carl Sagan
We are all just trying to make our way in the world.
From The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen
Ambiguity is the fundamental quality of human existence.
If we fail to develop a friendly AI, the consequences could be catastrophic.
From Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
In the end, we are all just stories.
We are all free, and we are all responsible.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
From The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape not just our economies but our societies and our very understanding of what it means to be human.
From The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher
To be human is to be in relation.
Man is a useless passion.
We are not human doings; we are human beings.
From Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee
There is no such thing as a purely rational act.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
To will oneself free is to will oneself a task.
Ambiguity is the very essence of the human condition.
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
The only way to deal with the future is to function in the present.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
From One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
From The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
The universe is a dark forest.
From The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.
From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Ambiguity is the foundation of human existence.
The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.
From Cosmos by Carl Sagan
We are condemned to be free.
We are not the authors of our own destinies; we are merely players in a larger game.
From The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
From The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
One must choose oneself; one must create oneself.
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
I have not only a past, but a future, and I can see it as well as I can see the present.
We can no longer think of ourselves as separate from the world.
From The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
To will oneself free is to will oneself as a subject that transcends itself.
You can never find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.
From The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
We are thrown into the world and must make sense of it.
From Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
Freedom is the source of all meaning.
Time is not a line, but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
From One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Rebellion is the way of the human being.
From The Rebel by Albert Camus
The unexamined life is not worth living.
From The Republic of Plato by Allan Bloom
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then.
He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.
From One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
To act is to create a value.
It’s a hard thing to go through life knowing that you’re going to die and not knowing how.
From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The search for God is ultimately a search for meaning.
From A History of God by Karen Armstrong
We are the architects of our own extinction.