There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the...

love starts with a shake-upwithin whole existence .

You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine-

These solitary ones who are free in spirit know thatin one thing or another they must constantly put on an appearance that is different from the way they think; although they want nothing but truth...

…the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

against another’s great merits, there is no remedy but love.”― Max Scheler

Youth, I didn’t want that illness. Luckily I recovered just in time for middle age. Now I can focus on more important things, like love, a relationship, and my upcoming existential crisis.

Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else’s shoes.

…And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn’t found mine.

Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not…it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home...

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

…and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough...

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our...

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it–it, the physical act.I simply...

How do text messages make you feel existential?I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than...

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me,...

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.

oThere’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our...

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if hehasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that youcan’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us...

In humans (and humans alone), sexuality is embodied in desire–in the primordial desire for life-as-relation. That the sex drive serves the vital desire for relation–that on the level of the primordial process, the desire for...

Let me not anchor you to a bed of weary rocks, but let me be the kite’s string that guides you in your flight.

Life has existential suffering; we become happy by caring.

Now you see. We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside of ourselves diminishes us — because comfort and power, unless they are...

Every plant is an individual.Wrong again. We are not individuals at all, we are all connected. We are individuals the way each blossom on an apple tree is an individual.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

Carry me like change in your pocket and spend me as you wish.

There was something vaguely sad about the rock. It was as old as it looked, standing weathered and lonely amidst the stretch of sand, and its thoughts were quiet as it listened to the waves.

We are facing an existential crisis… it will have a massive impact on our lives in the future, but also now, especially in vulnerable communities. And I think that we should wake up, and we...

I saw myself in a piece of glass that wasn’t a mirror. Was that my doppelganger or my clone? Who was that? Who am I? Maybe if I hadn’t been acting like a reverse Peeping...

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding–shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at...

At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.

The sea was no stranger to the rock on the beach. The sea came often to the rock, rushing up wetly against its warm grey, and always as it swept away it took an infinitesimal...

I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction...

We co-existed in peaceful detachment

When it has finished saying it, it no longer is. The longer it is in saying it, the more it can say it at length, the more slowly it melts, the better quality it is.

A shaft of sweetness shoots through me from top to toe when the sun rises; I shoulder my gun in silent exaltation.

She laughed. ‘It won’t last. Nothing lasts. But I’m happy now.”Happy,’ I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most...

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well...

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

We all have an opportunity and responsibility to create a legacy. A legacy which is resilient, sustainable and authentic.” – Jim Cookson, Doctoral Student, Ashridge Business School, UK, August 2014

They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

Wielders like you can see those possibilities. You can follow the threads and see where they begin and end, where and how they connect with everything else and what might happen if something changes along...

There’s real evil, Mr Honey. Not that existential crap, either.

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he’ll never see anything.

I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such...

Acts of violence– Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death–and the meaninglessness of killing.