{"quotes":[{"text":"Who cares what we dream about? Just getting through each day is hard enough.","author":"Inio Asano","tags":["difficulty","dream","existential","ignore","life"],"id":13004,"author_id":"Inio+Asano"},{"text":"It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.","author":"Leo Tolstoy","tags":["existential","human-nature","inspiration","life","morality","philosophy","psychology","societal-expectations","society"],"id":13785,"author_id":"Leo+Tolstoy"},{"text":"Every plant is an individual.Wrong again. We are not individuals at all, we are all connected. We are individuals the way each blossom on an apple tree is an individual.","author":"Dale Pendell","tags":["botany","connectivity","existential","individuality","plants"],"id":14398,"author_id":"Dale+Pendell"},{"text":"The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.","author":"William James","tags":["existence","existential","existentialism","philosophy"],"id":17563,"author_id":"William+James"},{"text":"Carry me like change in your pocket and spend me as you wish.","author":"Richard Ronald Allan","tags":["existence","existential","love","romance"],"id":18074,"author_id":"Richard+Ronald+Allan"},{"text":"Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live.","author":"Matthew Sanford","tags":["existential","life-and-death"],"id":20640,"author_id":"Matthew+Sanford"},{"text":"There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.","author":"Alastair Reynolds","tags":["achievement","existential","human","ships","space"],"id":24771,"author_id":"Alastair+Reynolds"},{"text":"But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if hehasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that youcan’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death.We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in themoment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.","author":"Henry Miller","tags":["existential","fight","soldier"],"id":30650,"author_id":"Henry+Miller"},{"text":"Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, 'comical.' It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["existential","existential-crisis","failure","life","life-lesson","life-meaning"],"id":31237,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.","author":"Søren Kierkegaard","tags":["consciousness","despair","existential"],"id":40640,"author_id":"S%C3%B8ren+Kierkegaard"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":81,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}