existential choices Quotes

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

Forced to recognize our inhumanity, our reason coexists with our insanity. And though we choose between reality and madness, it's either sadness or euphoria.

Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life. ... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

Everybody's got a worldview. Everybody's betting their life on something. ... You just better know why you're betting what you're betting on.

I would not choose to go where I would be afraid to die, nor could I bear to live without a good hope for hereafter.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term.

Most of us think that decisions such as where shall I live, with whom shall I partner, what shall I pick as a career for my life are the most important decisions that we make. But from the point of view of the universe these decisions are not that important. Within you, you have already made decisions about who you are, what the universe is and how you will relate to other people and how you will relate to the universe and these decisions are creating consequences in your life moment by moment.

Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

It is in the middle that human choices are made; the beginning and the end remain with God. The decrees of God are birth and death, and in between those limits man makes his own distress or joy.

The most important choices you make are the choices about how you see yourself, the Universe, and your relationship to the Universe.