The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.
Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i. e. , in an existential relation to life without intermission.
Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay.
Zen is not “attained” by mirror-wiping mediation, but by “self-forgetfulness in the existential 'present' of life here and now. ” We do not “come”, we “are. ” Don't strive to become, but be.
Despair is suffering without meaning.
All I've ever wanted to do was be a great dad, and yet there's no stopping this existential mirror that's held up to yourself when you're about to have a kid.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.
Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse - exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality.
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
And, what we've allowed ourselves to become - and this is part of Chris' ideas - is complacent, in allowing our lives to be taken over, or at least in allowing that kind of scrutiny into our lives. We've given up a little bit of that, and this is the existential nightmare of all of that. What happens when you suddenly find out that people have been watching you, with a purpose?
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.
Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth.
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
A paradox arises: the only way to meaning in freedom is through boundaries. The only way that boundaries make any sense at all is through freedom.
The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.