The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and the ignorance of the future.
Nothingness haunts Being.
Coen brothers movies are not always what life looks like but it's definitely what life feels like.
I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?
Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing.
Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?
I'm trying to get at this. That is, a man may know that he belongs to, say, a group - this group or that group - but he feels himself lost within that group, trapped within his own deficiencies and without personal purpose.
The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.
There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
My spirit is too weak--mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.
Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air
I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.
L'homme est condamne a' e" tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.
The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no'.
This mirror inside me shows. I can’t say what, but I can’t not know. I run from body. I run from spirit. I do not belong anywhere.
...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
I agree about Shaw - he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.
One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.
Why does man regret, even though he may endeavour to banish any such regret, that he has followed the one natural impulse, rather than the other; and why does he further feel that he ought to regret his conduct? Man in this respect differs profoundly from the lower animals.
Existence itself is disconcerting and disorienting.
