"Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail."
Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah (via poeticsofdeath)
Reblogged from poeticsofdeath with 41 notes / Zapffe The Last Messiah existentialism death quote
"I envied the people around me, hermetically closed in their mysteries and isolated from the tyranny of the objects. They were prisoners under their overcoats, but nothing coming from outside could harm them, […] nothing could infiltrate their magnificent prisons, while between me and the outer world there was no boundary, I was invaded by everything surrounding me, as if my whole skin were pierced. The attention […] with which I was looking around me, was not a simple act of will. The world was prolonging in me, naturally, all its tentacles, and all the long arms of the hydra were crossing my entrails. I was facing with despair the conviction that I was living in the world I was seeing. And I had no weapon to fight against this certitude."
Max Blecher, Adventures in Immediate Unreality (1936)
Reblogged from poeticsofdeath with 104 notes / absurdity blecher existentialism lit literature max blecher philosophy poetry prose romania surreal surrealism unreality avant-garde modernism
"If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule."
Arthur Schopenhauer (via leichenschrei)
Reblogged from leichenschrei-deactivated201210 with 11 notes / Arthur Schopenhauer existentialism
“No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.” - Emil Cioran
“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
Reblogged from substancem with 105 notes / cioran emil cioran emile cioran existentialism jean paul sartre nausea sartre to exist is to suffer softly
"The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that’s the worst of all fatigues. It doesn’t weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It’s the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in the soul."
Fernando Pessoa
writing through the character “Bernardo Soares”
Book of Disquiet
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(via sexpropscr3am)Reblogged from sexpropscr3am with 3 notes / lit Education Culture Writing Books Fernando Pessoa Consciousness Existentialism
"How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence."
Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair (via njardarson)
"I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."
The Stranger, Albert Camus (via blacklacedeyes)
Reblogged from dying-dearly with 15 notes / literature quote the stranger absurdism existentialism
