One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and tur...n 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential cour...age of the woman who gives birth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and... existential death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One fee...ls one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness--the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread,... and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It i...s precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »