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"What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much."
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Exlpore more Existentialism quotes
"We exist only to exist."
"One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other."
"About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times."
"It doesn't matter where I go, I don't want to be there. And then I get to the next place, and I don't want to be there either."
"Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?"
"We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real."
"He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror."
"Why are we here? Is there, really, some intelligent design? Why do we cry for someone who leaves us, if there's some Grand Pearly Gate in the sky? Why worry about how we build our lives if the ultimate ending for all is death, a single breath away?"
"CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that."
"It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish."
Explore more quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Ozymandias'I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away."
"Yes! all is past-swift time has fled away,Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind;How long will horror nerve this frame of clay?I'm dead, and lingers yet my soul behind.Oh! powerful Fate, revoke thy deadly spell,And yet that may not ever, ever be,Heaven will not smile upon the work of Hell;Ah! no, for Heaven cannot smile on me;Fate, envious Fate, has sealed my wayward destiny."
"War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men."
"I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me- who knows how?To thy chamber-window, Sweet!"
"And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest."
"Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart."
"There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman...."
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