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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

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

From Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything without it.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

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.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Rebellion is the struggle of being human.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

The greatest problem of our time is the search for meaning.

From The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler

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.

From The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

From The Stranger by Albert Camus

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

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

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

A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy.

From Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

From Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

To be happy, we must not be too happy.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

In the face of death, all men are equal.

From 1984 by George Orwell

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

From Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

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

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.

From The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

We must choose ourselves, as we are the ones responsible for our own existence.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

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.

From The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse

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.

From The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong

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

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.

From Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

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

There is no such thing as a purely rational act.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

The only way to deal with the future is to function in the present.

From At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

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.

From Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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 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

There is no reality except the one contained within us.

From At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

I have not only a past, but a future, and I can see it as well as I can see the present.

From The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

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.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

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

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

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.

From The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

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

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