Intro To Existentialism Quote ID
"the tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the ethical to have its telos in a higher expression of the ethical...here there can be no question of the teleological suspension of the ethical"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"they are aliens in this world"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
Faith "not as the content of a concept but as the form of the will."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
What is omitted from Abraham's story is the anxiety, because to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and holiest."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
unknown object of unknowable appraisals—in particular, of value judgments." I am a slave "to the degree that my being is dependent at the center of a freedom that is not mine and which is the very condition for my own being
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"[T]here can be no question of a universal clue by which the individual can determine whether he is in the paradox" (253).
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"[t]he work of reflection...is the task of the modern age.
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"a glance, a facial expression, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that would betray the infinite in heterogeneity with the finite"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"for it is not what happens to me that makes me great but what I do"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"not by being exempted in any way from the distress and agony of the paradox, but became greater by means of these"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"that one does not lose the finite but gains it whole and intact."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest...that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"the negative sign and predicate that dialectically makes sure that the scope of 'the purely human' is qualitatively terminated"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
We are taking the word 'responsibility' in its ordinary sense as 'consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or of an object
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
Yet I find an absolute responsibility for the fact that my facticity (here the fact of my birth) is directly inapprehensible and even inconceivable, for this fact of my birth never appears as a brute fact but always as a projective reconstruction of my for-itself
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
[E]ach person is an absolute upsurge at an absolute date and is perfectly unthinkable at another date
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
[E]mpirical psychoanalysis has decided upon its own irreducible instead of allowing this to make itself known in a self-evident intuition"
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"[T]he absurd is a category, and a category that can exercise a restraining influence.
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"'If I love you is that your concern' is a sufficient critique of all Christianity"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity:
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"[E]ach generation begins primitively, has no other task than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further, insofar as the previous generations did not betray the task and deceive themselves."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
To live this war is to choose myself through it and to choose it through my choice of myself.
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"[Greeks] assumed it to be a task for a whole lifetime, because proficiency in doubting is not acquired in days and weeks..."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
In the call, Dasein 'is' ahead of itself in such a way that at the same time it directs itself back to its thrownness...The voice calls back to the Being-guilty in which one has been thrown, which is earlier than any indebtedness."
Heidegger, Being and Time
In understanding the call, Dasein lets its ownmost Self take action in itself in terms of that potentiality-for-Being which it has chosen. Only so can it be answerable.
Heidegger, Being and Time
"'It' calls, even though it gives the concernfully curious ear nothing to hear which might be passed along in further retelling and talked about in public"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"As a phenomenon of Dasein conscience is not just a fact which occurs and is occasionally present at hand. It 'is' only in Dasein's kind of Being, and it makes itself known as a fact only with factical existence and in it"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"As modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mineness. But inauthenticity does not signify any 'lower' degree of Being. Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein is inauthentic—when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Being-guilty does not first result from an indebtedness, but [...] on the contrary, indebtedness becomes possible only on the basis of a primordial Being-guilty"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"But neither the call, nor the deed which has happened, nor the guilt with which one is laden, is an occurrence with the character of something present-at-hand which has run its course...
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Conscience gives us 'something' to understand: it discloses."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Conscience is not just a fact which occurs and is present-at-hand. It 'is' only in Dasein's kind of being."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Conscience summons Dasein's Self from its lostness in the 'they.'"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Dasein's lostness in the 'they', that factical potentiality-for-being which is closest to it (the tasks, rules, and standards, the urgency and extent, of concernful and solicitous Being-in-the-world) has already been decided upon...The 'they' even hides the manner in which it has tacitly relieved Dasein of the burden of explicitly choosing these possibilities...Dasein makes no choices, gets carried along by the nobody, and thus ensnares itself in inauthenticity."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"For the 'they,' the situation is essentially something that has been closed off. The 'they' only knows the 'general situation,' and loses itself in 'opportunities' which are closest to it..."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"If we analyze conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call. Calling is a mode of discourse."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"In having a potentiality-for-Being it always stands in one possibility or another: it is constantly not other possibilities, and it has waived these in its existentiell projections"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"In the following Interpretation we shall claim that this potentiality is attested by that which, in Dasein's everyday interpretation of itself, is familiar to us as the 'voice of conscience.'"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"In the phenomenon of conscience we find, without further differentiation, that in some way it gives us something to understand."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"It is no less possible to be serious when one experiences the conscience in the ordinary way than not be be serious when one's understanding of it is more primordial. Nonetheless. [our interpretation] also discloses possibilities for a more primordial existentiell understanding..."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world events, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going a 'soliloquy' in the Self to which it has appealed."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"The 'world' which is ready to hand does not become another one 'in its content,' not does the circle of 'Others' get exchanged for a new one..."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"The caller is defined in a 'worldly' way by nothing at all"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"The disclosedness of Dasein in wanting to have a conscience, is thus constituted by (1.) anxiety as a state-of-mind, by (2.) understanding as a projection of oneself upon one's ownmost Being-guilty, and by (3.) discourse as reticence. This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein by its conscience--this reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety--we call 'resoluteness'" (343)
Heidegger, Being and Time
"The everyday publicness of the 'they' (das Man)...brings tranquillized self-assurance
Heidegger, Being and Time
"The existential interpretation of conscience is to attest to Dasein's ownmost potentiality-for-Being—an attestation which takes place within Dasein itself. Conscience attests not by making something known in an undifferentiated manner, but by calling us to our own Being-guilty. This potentiality becomes 'grasped' in the hearing which understands the call undisguisedly in the sense it has itself intended...The authentic understanding of the call has been characterized as 'wanting to have a conscience'."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"The ontological analysis of conscience...is prior to any description and classification of the experiences of conscience, and likewise lies outside of any biological 'explanation' of this phenomenon (that would mean its dissolution). But it is no less distant from a theological exegesis of conscience or any employment of this phenomenon for proofs of God or for establishing an 'immediate' consciousness of God."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"This interpretation of the conscience passes itself off as recognizing the call in the sense of a voice which is 'universally' binding, and speaks in a way that is 'not just subjective'"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"This listening away must get broken off; in other words the possibility of another kind of hearing which will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein itself"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"To one's own Self. Not to what it counts for, can do, or concerns itself with one another publicly, nor to what it has taken hold of, set about, or let itself be carried along with."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"We must instead hold fast to the phenomenal finding that I receive the call both as coming from me and beyond me"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"We take calling as a mode of discourse. Discourse articulates intelligibility...Vocal utterance is not essential for discourse...If the everyday interpretation knows a 'voice' of conscience, the one is not so much thinking of an utterance (for this is something one factically never comes across); the 'voice' is taken rather as a giving-to-understand. In the tendency to disclosure which belongs to the call lies the momentum of a push--of an abrupt arousal. The call is from afar to afar. It reaches him who wants to be brought back."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"We would also misunderstand the ontological-existential structure of falling if we were to ascribe to it the sense of a bad or deplorable ontical property which more advanced stages of human culture might perhaps be able to rid themselves of"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"What if this Dasein, which finds itself in the very depths of its uncanniness, should be the caller of the call of conscience?"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"What we are seeking is an authentic potentiality-for-Being of Dasein, which will be attested in its existentiell possibility by Dasein itself"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"When 'delusions' arise in the conscience, they do so not because the call has committed some oversight (has mis-called), but only because the call gets heard in such a way that instead of becoming authentically understood, it gets drawn by the they-self into a soliloquy in which causes get pleaded, and it becomes perverted in its tendency to disclose."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"When Dasein brings itself back from the 'they,' the they-self is modified in an existentiell manner so that it becomes authentic Being-one's-Self. This must be accomplished by making up for not choosing. But 'making up' for not choosing signifies choosing to make this choice, deciding for a potentiality-for-Being and making this decision from one's own Self."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"While the content of the call is seemingly indefinite, the direction it takes is a sure one and is not to be overlooked."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"Yet what the call discloses is unequivocal, even though it may undergo a different interpretation in the individual Dasein in accordance with its own possibilities of understanding."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"[I]t may not be superfluous to remark that our own interpretation is ontological in its aims, and is far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"authentic disclosedness modifies with equal primordiality both the way in which the world is discovered...and the way in which the Dasein-with of Others is disclosed"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"becomes perverted in its signification by the everyday way of interpreting it"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"has, in each case, already abandoned itself to definite possibilities" (270); it has already "decided upon" "a factical potentiality-for-being"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"keeps within the dimension of concernfully reckoning up 'guilt' and 'innocence' and balancing them off," hiding the more primordial phenomenon of Being-guilty which is not "an occurrence with the character of present-at-hand"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"one takes the power itself as a person who makes himself known - namely God. On the other hand one may try to reject this explanation...and to explain away the conscience 'biologically'"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"so absorbed in the 'they' that it has let such possibilities be presented to it by the way in which the 'they' has interpreted these possibilities."
Heidegger, Being and Time
"that it is, and that it has to be something with a potentiality for being"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"the call discloses nothing which could be either positive or negative as something which with we could concern ourselves; for what is in view is a Being which is ontologically quite different—namely, existence"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"the cause or author of something, or even 'being the occasion' for something"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"the everyday experience of the conscience has no acquaintance with anything like being summoned to Bing-guilty"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"the everyday way of experiencing conscience is not existentially primordial" implies no judgment about the "existentiell moral quality of any Dasein which maintains itself in that experience"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"this Being-guilty is what provides, above all, the ontological condition for its ability to come to owe anything in factically existing"
Heidegger, Being and Time
"this public 'conscience'—what else is it than the voice of the 'they'?"
Heidegger, Being and Time
, "not least in the ways that they miss the phenomena and in the reasons why they conceal it"
Heidegger, Being and Time
, "will there not be falling and concealment in its interpretation of that very way of its Being which, as a call, seeks to bring it back from its lostness in the concerns of the 'they'?"
Heidegger, Being and Time
, if our formally existential definition of 'guilt' as 'Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity' is indeed correct"
Heidegger, Being and Time
But "losing itself in the publicness of the idle talk and the 'they,' it fails to hear its own Self in listening to the 'they' self."
Heidegger, Being and Time
Care is what we are most fundamentally, abstracted away from all worldly determinations; it is our "basic structure"
Heidegger, Being and Time
Factically, however, any taking-action is necessarily 'conscienceless,' not only because it may fail to avoid some factical indebtedness, but because, in Being with Others, one has already become guilty towards them. Thus one's wanting-to-have-a-conscience becomes the taking-over of that essential consciencelessness within which alone the existentiell possibility of being 'good' subsists"
Heidegger, Being and Time
That the 'fact' of conscience has been disputed, that its function as a higher court for Dasein's existence has been variously assessed, and that 'what conscience says' has been interpreted in manifold ways--all this might only mislead us into dismissing this phenomenon if the very 'doubtfulness' of this Fact--or the way it has been interpreted--did not prove that here a primordial phenomenon of Dasein lies before us."
Heidegger, Being and Time
These "for the sake of which" have been guided by its "concernful lostness in the 'they'"
Heidegger, Being and Time
Understanding the call is choosing; but it is not a choosing of conscience, which as such cannot be chosen. What is chosen is a having-a-conscience as Being-free for one's ownmost Being-guilty. 'Understanding the appeal' means 'wanting to have a conscience'...[I]t means solely that one is ready to be appealed to."
Heidegger, Being and Time
as Care, Dasein is "Ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world"
Heidegger, Being and Time
if our formally existential definition of 'guilt' as 'Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity' is indeed correct"
Heidegger, Being and Time
in its thrownness, is anxious about its potentiality-for-being...Dasein is falling into the 'they', and it is summoned out of this falling by the appeal"
Heidegger, Being and Time
or, as in the case when the conscience gives warning, refers to a possible 'Guilty!', or affirms, as with a 'good' conscience, that one is 'conscious of no guilt'...Whatever the ways in which conscience is experienced or interpreted, all our experiences 'agree' on this 'Guilty!'"
Heidegger, Being and Time
the fact that "there is nothing which the voice [of conscience] positively recommends and imposes"
Heidegger, Being and Time
Man is rather 'thrown' from Being itself into the truth of Being so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of Being, in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are. Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart...Man is the shepherd of Being. It is in this direction alone that Being and Time is thinking when ecstatic existence is experienced as 'care'
Heidegger, Letter On Humanism
The essence of man is ek-sistence but this is neither a realization of an essence nor a claim that ek-sistence effects or posits what is essential. The latter makes man into the "tyrant of being."
Heidegger, Letter On Humanism
"[M]y wish, my prayer, is that if it might occur to anyone to quote a particular saying from the books, he would do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonymous author"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"[Moderns] have all made this preliminary movement so easily they have no need to say how..."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"'If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.' This is a hard saying. Who can bear to listen to it?"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"A young lad falls in love with a princess, and this love is the entire substance of his life, and yet the relation is such that it cannot possibly be realized, cannot possibly be translated from ideality to reality"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Abraham is called the father of the faith because he has the formal qualifications of faith, believing against the understanding, although it never occurred to the Christian Church that Abraham's faith had the content of Christian faith, which relates essentially to a later historical event."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and walk...absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian--only that knight can do it, and this is the one and only marvel."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"By no means do I have faith. By nature I am a shrewd fellow, and shrewd people always have difficulty in making the movement of faith, but I do not attribute per se any worth to the difficulty that brought the shrewd person further in the overcoming of it than to the point at which the simplest and most unsophisticated person arrives more easily"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Even if someone were able to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form, it does not follow that he has comprehended faith, comprehended how he entered it or how it entered him"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it, for that which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Faith is namely this paradox that the individual is higher than the universal--yet, please note, in such a way that the movement repeats itself, so that after having been in the universal he as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal. If this is not faith, then Abraham is lost, then faith never existed in the world precisely because it has always existed"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Faith was then a task for a whole lifetime because it was assumed that proficiency in believing is not acquired in either days or weeks."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Fools and young people say that everything is possible for a human being. But that is a gross error. Strictly speaking, everything is possible, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"For God's sake and--the two are identical--for his own sake. He does it for God's sake because God demands this proof of his faith; he does it for his own sake so that he can prove it"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"For if the ethical—that is social morality—is the highest...then no categories are needed other than what Greek philosophy had or what can be deduced from them by consistent thought. Hegel should not have concealed this, for, after all, he has studied Greek philosophy"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"From this it does not follow that ethical should be invalidated; rather the ethical receives a completely different expression, a paradoxical expression, such as, for example, that love to God may bring the knight of faith to love his neighbor—an expression opposite to that which, ethically speaking, is duty."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"He makes a movement even more wonderful than all of the others, for he says: Nevertheless, I have faith that I will get her--that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"I am a poet. But long before I became a poet I was intended for the life of religious individuality. And the event whereby I became a poet was...a teleological suspension of the ethical
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"If a person lacks this concentration, this focus, his soul is dissipated in multiplicity from the beginning, he acts shrewdly in life as the financiers who put their resources into widely diversified investments, he is not a knight."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol--where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshipping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshipping an idol."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"If this [that man must subordinate himself to the universal] is the highest thing that can be said of man and his existence, then the ethical is the same nature as person's eternal salvation, which is his telos forevermore and at all times since it would be a contradiction for this to be capable of being surrendered..."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"In Fear and Trembling, I am just as little, precisely just as little, Johannes de Silentio as the knight of faith he depicts, and in turn just as little the author of the preface of the book, which is the individuality-lines of a poetically actual subjective thinker."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"In our age, everyone is unwilling to stop with faith but must go further."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at a lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person. For instance, at my level the Pauline doctrine of predestination is ugly nonsense, irreligiousness. Hence it is not suitable for me, since the only use I could make of the picture offered would be a wrong one. If it is a good and godly picture, then it is so for someone at quite a different level..."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Is something our duty because God commands it, or does God command it because it is our duty?"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Is the holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"It goes without saying that any other interest in which an individual has concentrated the whole reality of actuality can, if it proves to be unrealizable, prompt the movement of resignation"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"It is enough to know what is great, no other work is needed."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"It is quite right to say that paganism did not have faith, but if something is supposed to have been said thereby, then one must have a clearer understanding of what faith is, for otherwise one falls into cliches"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Most people lived completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Nevertheless, this marvel [of faith] can so easily deceive that I shall describe the movements in a specific case that can illuminate their relation to actuality, for this is the central issue."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The absolute duty can lead one to do what ethics would forbid, but it can never lead the knight of faith to stop loving. Abraham demonstrates this. In the moment he is about to sacrifice Isaac, the ethical expression for what he is doing is: he hates Isaac. [He must still love him internally though] for it is indeed his love of Isaac that makes his act a sacrifice by its paradoxical contrast to his love of God"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The angel went to only Mary and no one could understand her"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent on itself, has nothing outside of itself that is its telos but is itself the telos for everything outside of itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it goes not further"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The ethical is the universal, and as such it is also the divine. Thus it is proper to say that every duty is essentially a duty to God, but if no more can be said than this, then it is also said that I have no duty to God."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The great thing was that he loved God in such a way that he was willing to offer him the best."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The knight of faith is assigned solely to himself; he feels the pain of being unable to make himself understandable to others, but he has no vain desire to instruct others"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation...But every time they come down,...they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in this world."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The single individual, sensately and psychically qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his telos in the universal, and it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity in order to become the universal. As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can be he be reconciled with the universal"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The slaves of the finite scream: that kind of love is foolishness, the rich brewers widow is just as good and solid a match"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"The true knight of faith is always in absolute isolation; the spurious knight is sectarian"
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"They are easily recognizable--for their walk is light and bold."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"They who carry the treasure of faith are likely to disappoint, for externally they have a striking resemblance to bourgeois philistinism."
Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling
"After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will still be shown. -And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"All such world affirmations or world negations lack any grain of significance when measured scientifically...
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Another ideal runs before us, a peculiar, seductive, dangerous ideal to which we wouldn't want to persuade anyone, since we don't readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively, i.e. not deliberately but from overflowing abundance and power, with everything that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine..."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"As interpreters of our experiences.—One type of honesty has been alien to all religion-founders and such: they have not made their experiences a matter of conscience for their knowledge. 'What did I really experience? What was going on inside and around me?...' None of them have asked such questions...But we reason-thirsty ones want to face our experiences as sternly as we would a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We want to be our own experiments and guinea pigs!"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power over them; that is all one desires in such cases!"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Common natures consider all noble, magnanimous feelings inexpedient and therefore first of all incredible."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"For an individual to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, joys, and rights."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things: then I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish to be more than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally his only piety, his 'service of God.'"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"If [modern] education succeeds then every virtue of an individual is a public utility and a private disadvantage, measured with respect to the highest private end [Zieles]--probably some impoverishment of the spirit and the senses and premature demise." How does this education work?
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"One thing is needful. - To 'give style' to one's character - a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye...In the end, when the work is finished it becomes evident that a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad matters less than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The change in general taste is more powerful than that of opinions. Opinions, along with all proofs, refutations, and the whole intellectual masquerade, are merely symptoms of a change of taste and most certainly not what they are often taken to be, its causes. What changes taste? The fact that some individuals who are powerful announce without any shame, hoc est ridiculum"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The human being who wants to behold the supreme measures of value of his time must 'overcome' this time in himself--this is the test of his strength--and consequently not only his time but also his prior aversion and contradiction against his this time, his un-timeliness, his romanticism."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The praise of virtue is thus...the praise of instincts that deprive a human being of his noblest selfishness and the strength of his highest autonomy"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The scope of the moral.—As soon as we see a new picture, we immediately construct it with the help of all of the old experiences we have had depending on the degree of our honesty and justice. There are no experiences other than moral ones, not even in the realm of sense perception"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The significance and originality of the founder of a religion usually consists of his seeing it, selecting it, and guessing for the first time to what use it can be put, how it can be interpreted."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloak of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far and I have asked myself whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the history of thought are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution..."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloak of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths--and often I asked myself, taking the long view, whether philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"This book might need more than one preface and in the end there would still be room for doubting whether someone who has not experienced something similar could, by means of prefaces, be brought closer to the experiences [Erlebnisse] of this book"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"This is the genuine phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness makes it so that the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token, shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves great and thorough corruption, falsification (Fälschung), reduction to superficialities, and generalization"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one sullen. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is love for a woman that causes doubts for us."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"We 'conserve' nothing; neither do we want to return to any past"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead us to feel at home in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its 'realities,' we do not believe that they will last...we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin 'realities.'"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"We have left land and we have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us--indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us...Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it is spread our like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize it is infinite and there is nothing more awesome than infinity"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"What we see in [modern ideals] is merely an expression and a masquerade of a profound weakening, of weariness, of old age, of declining energies"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Whatever harmed the herd...prompted the sting of conscience in the individual - and in his neighbor too and in the whole herd. - There is no point on which we have learned to think and feel more differently" (§117).
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature" (§109).
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Wherever we encounter a morality, we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions. These valuations and order of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: that which benefits it most, and second most, etc."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"Whoever has a soul that craves to have experienced the whole range of values and desiderata to date...needs one thing above everything else: the great health - that one does not merely have but also acquires continuously, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"[S]cholars, insofar as they belong to the intellectual middle class, are not even allowed to catch sight of the really great problems and questions."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"[T]he motives to this morality stand in opposition to its principle."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and in a day after tomorrow...of reopened seas, of goals [Zielen] that are permitted and believed in again."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"is a sacrifice that is offered for our desire of power or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of power. He who feels 'I am in possession of the truth'—how many possessions does he not renounce in order to preserve this feeling!"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure—patiently, severely coldly, without yielding, but also without hope—and is now all of a sudden attacked by hope, by hope for health, by the intoxication of recovery"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"radical seclusion as a self-defense against a pathologically clairvoyant contempt for humanity, this limitation in principle to what was bitter, harsh, painful to know, as prescribed by the nausea that had gradually developed from an incautious and excessively luxurious spiritual diet called romanticism"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"rest content with our supposition that our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events has now reached its apex"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"spreading a Homeric light and glory over all things"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole nature of moral judgment to date."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under its perspectival forms and only in these."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push and lure the mind - towards sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"to what extent can the truth endure incorporation?—that is the question, that is the experiment"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but rather something else—let us say health, future, growth, power, life..."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
"your virtue is the health of your soul"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
...what is required is to stop courageously at the surface"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
he simply cannot keep from transposing his states every time into the most spiritual form and distance, this art of transfiguration just is philosophy"
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Nothing prevents our conceiving a priori of a 'human reality' which would not be expressed by the will to power, for which the libido would not constitute the original undifferentiated project."
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
The following descriptions of concrete behavior must therefore be envisages within the perspective of conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others"
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"It's is a certain art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea"
Sartre, Bad Faith
But to the extent that human reality cannot be defined by patterns of conduct, I am not one"
Sartre, Bad Faith
The ideal description of the liar would be cynical consciousness, 1.) affirming the truth within himself, 2.) denying it in his words, and 3.) denying that negation as such"
Sartre, Bad Faith
To believe is to know that one believes, but to know that one believes is to no longer believe
Sartre, Bad Faith
To the extent that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of a pederast and to the extent that I have adopted this conduct, I am a pedarast
Sartre, Bad Faith
"Each result will be fully contingent [on the individual] and legitimately irreducible [since it rests on choice]."
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it.
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"Fundamentally, man is the desire to be"; more precisely, "man is the being whose project is to be God," to be only what it is for itself.
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it. Moreover, everything which happens to me is mine"
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"[T]here are no accidents in life; a community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside. If I am mobilized in war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"we have encountered the self-evident irreducible when we have reached the project of being."
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
But since this perception by its very nature refers to something other than to itself...its essence must refer to a primary relation between my consciousness and the Other's
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
During an attack men who are crawling through the brush apprehend as a look to be avoided, not two eyes, but a white farm-house which is outlined against the sky
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
Every look directed towards me is manifested in connection with the appearance of a sensible form in our perceptive field, but contrary to what may be expected, it is not connected with any determinate form
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
He must assume the situation with the proud consciousness of being the author of it, for the very worst disadvantages or the worst threats which can endanger my person have meaning only in and through my project...It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are"
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
I am in a public park. Not far away there is a lawn and along the edge of that lawn there are benches. A man passes by those benches. I see this man; I apprehend him as an object and at the same time as a man.
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
I am responsible for everything, in fact, except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
I am spatialized and temporalized
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
If I apprehend the look, I cease to perceive the eyes...This is because to perceive is to look at, and to apprehend a look is not to apprehend a look-as-object in the world; it is to be conscious of being looked at.
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
Man is the being whose [fundamental] project is to be God"
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
Thus in a certain sense I choose being born
Sartre, Being And Nothingness
"Choosing to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us unless it is good for all"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"Existentialism is nothing else than the attempt to draw all the consequences from a coherent atheistic position"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"Humanism, because we remind man that there is no other law-maker other than himself, and that in his abandonment he will decide by himself; because we point out that man will fulfill himself as man, not in turning toward himself, but in seeking outside himself a goal which is just this liberation, just this particular fulfillment"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus there is no human nature because there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"In response I can say that I very much regret that it should be so; but if I have eliminated God the Father there has to be someone to invent values...Life is nothing until it is lived; it we who give it meaning. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating a human community"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is abandoned, because neither within him nor without him does he find anything to rely on. He can't start making excuses for himself."
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"It means that we shall limit ourselves to reckoning only with what depends upon our will, or on the set of probabilities that make our action possible"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"The moment the possibilities I am considering are not rigorously involved in my action, I ought to disengage my self from them..."
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"We may judge (and this may be a logical rather than a value judgment) that certain choices are based on error and others on truth. We may also judge a man when he is act bad faith (mauvaise foi)."
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"What [the existentialists] have in common is simply their belief that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be our point of departure
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"When we speak of abandonment, a term Heidegger was fond of, we merely mean to say that God does not exist and that we have to face all of the consequences of this...Man is condemned to be free"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"You have seen that it cannot be regarded as a philosophy of quietism since it defines man by his actions; nor as a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic, since the destiny of man lies within himself. Nor is it an attempt to discourage man from action since it tells him that there is no hope except in his action, and that the only thing that allows him to live is action. Consequently, we are dealing with a morality of action and self-commitment"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"[T]here is no explaining things away by reference to a given and immutable nature."
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"whenever a man sanely and sincerely involves himself and chooses his configuration, it is impossible for him to prefer another configuration..."
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
Man exists only as "a plan that is conscious of itself.
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
There are two senses to the word 'subjectivism', and our adversaries play on these two senses. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject to choose what he will be and, on the other, man's inability to transcend human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper sense (le sens profond) of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we not only mean that every one of us must choose himself; but we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
What it means is this: the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a legislator who is, at the same time, choosing what humanity as a whole should be, can not help escape the feeling of his own full and profound responsibility"
Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism
"Ontology has revealed to us, in fact, the origin and nature of value; we have seen that value is the lack in relation to which the for-itself determines its being as a lack. By the very fact that the for-itself exists, value arises to haunt its being-for-itself. It follows that the various tasks of the for-itself can be made the object of an existential psychoanalysis, for they all aim at producing the missing synthesis of consciousness and being in the form of value or self-cause" (626).
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
"[Man] expresses himself as a whole in even his most insignificant and his most superficial behavior"
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
"only the comparison of...acts of conduct can effect the emergence of the unique revelation which they all express in a different way"
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
Empirical psychoanalysis seeks to determine the complex, the very name of which indicates the polyvalence of all the meanings which are referred back to it. Existential psychoanalysis seeks to determine the original choice"
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
women is "many civilizations" who "only submit to the laws, the gods, the customs, of the males."
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
It is a method destined to bring to light, in a strictly objective form, the subjective choice by which each living person makes himself a person; that is, makes known to himself what he is. Since what the method seeks is a choice of being at the same time as a being, it must reduce particular behavior patterns to fundamental relations--not of sexuality or of the will to power, but of being--which are expressed in this behavior"
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
It is then that his freedom will become conscious of itself and will reveal itself in anguish as the unique source of value and the nothingness by which the world exists"
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
Results have the necessary defect of being third-personal whereas "[t]his project-for-itself can be experienced only as a living possession; there is an incompatibility between existence-for-itself and objective existence"
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
The principle result of existential psychoanalysis must be to make us repudiate the spirit of seriousness.
Sartre, Existentialist Psychoanalysis
"For Hegel the surpassed terms are preserved only as abstract moments, whereas we consider that existence still remains a negativity in the positive affirmation of itself"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
"To will oneself as free is to effect the transition from nature to morality by establishing genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our existence"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
"a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
"it is not impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete, particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and irreducible as subjectivity itself"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
"pure internality against which no external power can take hold"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
(Husserlian Reduction) prevents the errors of dogmatism by suspending all affirmation concerning the mode of reality of the external world whose presence the reduction does not, however, contest" (14)
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
Existential conversion prevents the errors of absolutism by suspending all affirmation concerning the rightness of my desires, plans, etc. and considering them only in connection with the freedom that projects them.
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid."
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
Individual as "a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
Man as "nothing more than an individuality in the collectivity he depends on"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
The will is defined only by raising obstacles, and by the contingency of facticity certain obstacles let themselves be conquered and others do not"
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
by giving itself a particular content, aims by means of it at an end which is nothing other than the free movement of existence
Simone De Beauvoir, Ambiguity And Freedom
"After Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also railed at the deceitful stupidity of the serious man and his universe. Being and Nothingness is in large part a description of the serious man and his universe...There is the serious from the moment that freedom denies itself to the advantage of ends which one claims are absolute"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
"An ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existents can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
"Conscious of being unable to be anything, man decides to be nothing...The nihilist is close to the spirit of seriousness, for instead of realizing his negativity as a living movement, he conceived his annihilation in a substantial way"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
"Critical thought attempts to militate everywhere against all species of the serious but without foundering in the anguish of pure negation. It sets up a superior, universal and timeless value, objective truth." He attempts to criticize all sides in the name of total truth--but being alive means taking sides
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
"In laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, one contests the meaning of the project at the very moment one defines it...To convert the absence into presence, to convert my flight into will, I must assume my project positively
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
"The cause of the passionate man's torment is his distance from the object; but he must accept it instead of trying to eliminate it"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
"what distinguishes adventure from a simple game is that the adventurer does not limit himself to asserting his existence in solitary fasion. He asserts it in relation to other existences. He has to declare himself"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
? "The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification, But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and make himself exist validly"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
But one also considers the solitude in which this subjectivity encloses itself as injurious"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
By the incoherence of his plans, by his haphazard whims, or by his indifference, he reduces to nothingness the meaning of his surpassing"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
He discovers his subjectivity; he discovers that of others...He will have to choose and decide. It is comprehensible that it is hard for him to live this moment in his history, and this is doubtless the deepest reason for the crisis of adolescence; the individual must at last assume his subjectivity"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, [Hegel] has shown that the serious man plays the part of the inessential in the face of the object which is considered as essential. He suppresses himself to the advantage of the Thing, which sanctified in this respect, appears in the form of a Cause: science, philosophy, revolution, etc. But the truth is that the ruse miscarries, for the Cause cannot save the individual insofar as he is a concrete and separate existence."
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
It is "satisfying only at a subjective moment, which, in fact, is a quite abstract moment"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
It is in this moment of justification--a moment that extends throughout his whole adult life--that the attitude of man is placed on a moral plane"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
It regards as privileged situations those which permit it to realize itself as indefinite movement; that is, it wishes to pass beyond everything which limits its power; and yet, this power is always limited. Thus, just as life is identified with the will to live, freedom always appears as a movement of liberation"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse "passing from grief to the assumption of this grief"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Passion is converted to genuine freedom only if one destines his existence to other existences through the being by which he aims without hoping to entrap it in the destiny of the in-itself"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
The child's situation is characterized by finding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped establish, which has been fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else. At the same time that it requires the realization of concrete ends, it requires itself universally"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
The value of the chosen end is confirmed and, reciprocally, the genuineness of the choice is manifested concretely through patience, courage, and fidelity
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
This is the moment of moral choice; henceforth a "rigorous circle is created from which one is more and more unlikely to escape"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Thus I can not genuinely desire an end today without desiring it through my whole existence, insofar as the future of this present moment and insofar as it is the surpassed past of days to come
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining the original movement can be considered sub-men"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Value is this lacking-being of which freedom makes itself a lack; and it is because of the latter that value appears
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
What characterizes the passionate man is that he sets up the object as absolute, not, like the serious man, as a thing detached from himself, but as a thing disclosed by his subjectivity
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Whether he succeeds or fails, he goes right ahead throwing himself into a new enterprise with the same indifferent ardor. It is not from things that he expects the justification of his choices
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
[O]nce there appears the possibility of liberation, it is resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility, a resignation which implies dishonesty and which is a positive fault."
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society"
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
no means for breaking the ceiling stretched over their heads."
Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity