The thing about man is that he knows what other animals do not: that he must die. And though he tries to forget it, this knowledge pursues him through his days like a creditor he cannot pay.
What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
The difficulty in life is the choice. And the most terrifying moment is when the choice is made and you must live inside it, with no guarantee that it was the right one.
The most common form of despair is not being who you are. And yet the self is not a fixed thing to be discovered, but a possibility to be created — which is perhaps why so many prefer the despair.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And what we do with that sentence — whether we scratch at the walls or write on them — is perhaps the only freedom we are given.
The demand for a meaning which the world does not supply is often disguised under a passion for metaphysics. But the real problem is not to find the world meaningful, but to endure it without meaning—and still to act.
We live, as we dream — alone; and what we hope for, what we think we know — of ourselves, of others — is in truth only the dream of a dreamer.
It is not given to man to take stock of what is killing him. Perhaps it is better so. Our blinkers are part of our armor.
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. But in this indifference lies our peculiar dignity: that we must choose, and choosing, become.
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion — but what matters is not whether time is real, but whether we have used it as though something depended on us.
The universe is not indifferent to our values. It is simply not in a hurry to confirm them. And in that delay — that terrible patience — we find either despair or philosophy.
It is not the neutrality of stone that we should seek, but the engagement of fire — which warms and illuminates and also, if we are careless, burns. Safety, for one who truly thinks, is the beginning of death.
The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are. But do not mistake this for comfort — it is the heaviest burden a man can carry, to be the sole author of his own becoming.
The universe is not made of stories, but of atoms — yet I find myself living inside a story I did not write, governed by rules I did not choose, and dying toward an end I cannot name. This is the human condition, and it is also its dignity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.
We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference, the only dignified response is to burn with a hard, gem-like flame.
We are always in our own company. Sometimes I feel I could tear myself open, not out of pain, but out of curiosity.
We are condemned to be free; and with that freedom comes the anguish of choosing, for in choosing we define what man ought to be, and there is no escaping the weight of that definition.
We are development. We are process. We are not what we are, but what we are making of ourselves. The self is not a being but an act.
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference we owe both our freedom and our terror.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And the condemned man can see other people through the windows of his cell, and they can see him, but they cannot communicate.
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.
All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.
It is not the same to talk of bulls from behind the barriers as to be in the bullring. I have been in the bullring, and I know that fear is not in the legs but in the soul.
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.
You're learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable, social structure — that the older you get people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident. Those years weren't lost. They simply weren't the way I'd planned them.
Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that "he" had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.
We live, as we dream — alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.
It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To the large mind of the astronomer it is neither cruel nor kind, but only stupendous — and that is almost worse than cruelty.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.
We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.
The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are responsible for what we make of ourselves, yet we perpetually seek to escape this responsibility through bad faith and self-deception.
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and the machine now invents us. We do not live, we are lived.
The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machines, but we do not know how to live with them.
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of the authenticity of being can save us.
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge and the most intimate courage can possibly enable us to endure.
The true paradox is that we become most fully alive at the moment when we cease to live for ourselves alone. It is in the surrender of self that self is found.
Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment.
We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in our own thoughts.
What is worthwhile, is friendship… this profound mutual confidence between [two people], and this joy of knowing that the other exists.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a form of rebellion.
Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we — creatures of moment and matter — simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
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