Existentialism Famous Quotes

If you get in tune with the tendency field, through expanding and exploring the set of positive characteristics within yourself, the tendency field responds with constant energy, and affirmations. If you work against the tendency field, by being negative, unfair, unloving, and unconscious of the truth, you weaken your connection to the tendency field, and you experience existential dread, no matter how rich or famous or powerful you are.

I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?

I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this ‘master and proprietor’ is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.

Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes. I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I “just liked to drink.” I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.

Take Michael Oakeshott’s famous definition in his essay “On Being Conservative”: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott’s either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is not between something and its opposite but between something and its negation.

The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.1

I sat down and looked at the menu and thought how ironic it was that back then starving artists came to cafes like these because they lived on wine and street pigeons to survive, and now the same cafes are famous because of them and no starving artist can afford to eat there. It's hard to have an existential crisis when a glass of wine costs more than nine dollars.

. This is also true of Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, one of Sartre’s best-known literary works can be shown to embody Nietzsche’s ideas: the ethic of The Flies differs sharply from Sartre’s own Being and Nothingness, finished at the same time, and from his famous lecture, Existentialism Is a Humanism, but contains dozens of echoes of Nietzsche’s writings, and the central motifs of the play are Nietzschean.1

A government has the duty to preserve the order as well as the truth which it represents; when a Gnostic leader appears and proclaims that God or progress, race or dialectic, has ordained him to become the existential ruler, a government is not supposed to betray its trust and to abdicate. And this rule suffers no exception for governments which operate under a democratic constitution and a bill of rights. Justice Jackson in his dissent in the Terminiello case formulated the point: the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. A democratic government is not supposed to become an accomplice in its own overthrow by letting Gnostic movements grow prodigiously in the shelter of a muddy interpretation of civil rights; and if through inadvertence such a movement has grown to the danger point of capturing existential representation by the famous “legality” of popular elections, a democratic government is not supposed to bow to the “will of the people” but to put down the danger by force and, if necessary, to break the letter of the constitution in order to save its spirit.

Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne. And Picasso once said that what matters most to us in Cézanne, more than his pictures, is his anxiety. It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator, so that his encounter with the work is--at least while the work is new-- a genuine existential predicament. Like Kierkegaard's God, the work molests us with its aggressive absurdity [...]. It demands a decision in which you discover something of your own quality; and this decision is always a "leap of faith," to use Kierkegaard's famous term. And like Kierkegaard's God, who demands a sacrifice from Abraham in violation of every moral standard: like Kierkegaard's God, the picture seems arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while it makes no promise of future rewards. In other words, it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public, artists included, should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world oer seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas's other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato's myth? He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and time again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and time again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the "Es muss sein!" of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

In June 1981, a strike shuttered the major leagues for fifty days, the first time in baseball history that players walked out during the season. Determined to make his people earn their keep, George Steinbrenner ordered his major-league coaches into the minors to scout and help mentor the organization’s prospects. Berra drew Nashville, where Merrill was the manager. Merrill was a former minor-league catcher with a degree in physical education from the University of Maine. He began working for the Yankees in 1978 at West Haven, Connecticut, in the Eastern League and moved south when the Yankees took control of the Southern League’s Nashville team in 1980. Suddenly, in mid-1981, the former catcher who had never made it out of Double-A ball had the most famous and decorated Yankees backstop asking him, “What do you want me to do?” Wait a minute, Merrill thought. Yogi Berra is asking me to supervise him? “Do whatever you want,” Merrill said. “No,” Berra said. “Give me something specific.” And that was when Merrill began to understand the existential splendor of Yogi Berra, whom he would come to call Lawrence or Sir Lawrence in comic tribute to his utter lack of pretense and sense of importance. “He rode buses with us all night,” Merrill said. “You think he had to do that? He was incredible.” One day Merrill told him, “Why don’t you hit some rollers to that lefty kid over there at first base?” Berra did as he was told and later remarked to Merrill, “That kid looks pretty good with the glove.” Berra knew a prospect when he saw one. It was Don Mattingly, who at the time was considered expendable by a chronically shortsighted organization always on the prowl for immediate assistance at the major-league level.

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.

Bourdieu argued that a dominant class enforces rules about what is and is not acceptable. It defines good art, good food, good books—and creates an exclusionary vocabulary for describing them. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” he famously wrote.

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Beckett’s famous existential cry at the end of The Unnamable, which he now quoted aloud, just as he had many times throughout his life: “‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most widely recognized and cited thinkers of existential philosophy. A movement of thinking that took form during the 19th century, fashioned by individuals like Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and then further popularized by individuals including Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and of course, Sartre. In Sartre’s lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, he famously summarized the primary existential principle with the line, “Existence precedes essence.” The essence here meaning the qualities of a thing that creates its purpose. For example, Sartre references how a paper-knife is designed with a specific purpose in mind before it is made. And only once it is given a predetermined purpose and designed accordingly, is it manufactured into being. In which case, its essence precedes its existence. With exception to itself, humanity does this with nearly everything it makes. As rational beings, we create out of reason. Even if the reason is to make the point that we can create things for no reason, we have merely found ourselves in the paradox of creating for the reason of having none, which remains a reason. We exist with the innate desire for a reason. What we do. Who we are. Why we are. And so on. And here lies the beginning of our existential problem. According to Sartre and many others, there is no predetermined meaning or reason to human life. There is no authority figure designing us or our lives. And there is no essence to our existence prior to our existence. But rather, life exists for itself, and beyond itself, it is intrinsically meaningless. Whenever our sense of reason and logic confront this potential realization, that the nature of life, including the most essential part of our life, our self, appears to not agree with the same order of reason, we can often find ourselves in a sort of existential crisis. However, Sartre and the existentialists don’t see this as despairing, but rather, justification for living.

This reminded me of psychotherapist Fritz Perls' famous observation: “Fear is just excitement without breath.” In other words, fear is just excitement without embrace and approval for the sensations.

ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict.

[...] I wonder here what would an ethics based on the radically non-relational look like? Insofar as the constant recognition of our existential interdependency cannot substantially challenge the many forms of segregations on the steady rise in our current times, it seems to me that assuming the inevitability of our ontological entanglement may need some re-thinking. In light of what I perceive to be relationality’s inability to maintain its ethical currency when faced with the extended rupture blackness sustains on ethics, Fred Moton’s understanding of relationality is pertinent here. In his famous essay “Blackness and Nothingness,” Moten understands relationality to be “an expression of power, structured by the giveness of a transcendental subjectivity that the black cannot have but by which the black can be had.” It is, indeed, “a structural position that he or she cannot take but by which he or she can be taken.” In other words, relationality is inherently not only a position that the black cannot afford or even claim. The structure of relationality is essentially the condition for the possibility of their enslavement. I wonder, therefore, whether our naïve reliance on a type of inherent co-dependence has recently done more harm than good—that is to say, has instead worked to obstruct the very possibility of a positive transformation of our ethical sensibilities.

In The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf’s biography of the famous nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, I learned he’d had it too. Von Humboldt wondered aloud why being in the outdoors evoked something existential and true. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul,” he wrote; “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” and therefore nature “gives the impression of the whole.” Humboldt went on to introduce the European intellectual world to the concept of the planet as a living whole, with climatic systems and interlocking biological and geological patterns bound up as a “net-like, intricate fabric.” This was Western science’s earliest glimmer of ecological thinking, where the natural world became a series of biotic communities, each acting upon the others.

If Ellison's words serve as a meditation on the existential challenges of a Black life, then Toni Morrison's famous quip of a response "Invisible to whom?"-is a reminder that Black folks have had to see each other regardless of what the larger world will recognize. That too is the majesty of the blues, a beauty shared and witnessed by its people, no matter who is listening. It is not the sound of appeal; it is the act of living. Together.