Gordon Marino > Quotes

“When you have the auriferous sunlight, bask in it, grow, take risks, be creative, dance above the abyss of your own impending death.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“We need the love of others to love ourselves, but in order to be nurtured by the love of others, we need to love ourselves sufficiently to accept that love.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“existence precedes essence,”
― Gordon Daniel Marino, Basic Writings of Existentialism

“Kierkegaard professed that when it comes to the spiritual life and to love we see best when our eyes are tightly shut and we are blind to the differences between ourselves and our neighbor.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“I was born here and I'll die here against my will.”
― Gordon Marino, Ethics: The Essential Writings

“all the existentialists concur that it is through our choices that we become who we are.”
― Gordon Marino, Ethics: The Essential Writings

“human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation. For those who do not immediately pitch the book across the room, Kierkegaard continues, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Faith is not so much a matter of belief as it is a matter of how you relate to your unbelief.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Pharmaceutical companies were not content to hawk medications; they were also marketing psychological disorders themselves.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Nietzsche emphasizes the urgent importance of being able to get into the ring with your fears. After all, if you can’t take a hit, much less absorb the fear of taking a hit, then there is no way around it: you are going to be morally challenged.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Camus describes life as a collision between human beings who have an innate craving for meaning and a universe that is as indifferent as rock, utterly devoid of meaning. No matter, Camus counsels that we should put the revolver back in the drawer. Consciousness of absurdity is worth the candle, for as Camus pronounces, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” or laughter.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Faith is not something you lose. It is a possibility that you push away and then, after a time, feel as though it was something you passively lost when in fact it was an essential something that you rejected.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“No matter what you might think of Freud, who, by the way, was about as far from an existentialist as possible, he was astute in observing that there is a fury beneath the apparent passivity of the depressive, a merciless and relentless rage directed at the self.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Earnest reflection on the meaning of our inevitable death, Kierkegaard promises, will allow every moment to become more valuable and endow finite issues with new and more powerful significance.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Pharmaceutical companies were not content to hawk medications; they were also marketing psychological disorders themselves”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“In Postscript, Kierkegaard proclaims, “where there is certainty, there is no faith.” Or again, where there is certainty, there is no risk, and “where there is no risk, there is no faith.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Socrates believed that philosophy, rather than an art of living, was a practice in dying, a lifelong practice in separating yourself from the senses and emotions that he thought obscured the sidereal light of reason.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Thinking from within the coordinates of my own existence earmarks the existential point of view.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Pardon the repeats and what rings of a sermon, but it is paradoxical: we need the love of others to love ourselves, but in order to be nurtured by the love of others, we need to love ourselves sufficiently to accept that love.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.

Whereas a table is a table is a table, humans have no preexisting essence and so define themselves,”
― Gordon Marino, Ethics: The Essential Writings

“I once spoke with a young athlete who, crestfallen, confided that she had just been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Much of her identity and her ways of coping with anxiety had been built around having six-pack abs and sweating it out. Not being able to push herself as much physically is not the end of the world, but she will surely have to struggle to sustain a kind heart in the midst of her anger, her disappointment, and the anxiety that she can no longer leave behind in the weight room.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“In the modern era, periods of cataclysms have always been a boon to existentialism. Following the abattoir of the First World War, many turned to writers who grasped that life was not dictated by reason, to help them understand, or at least come to grips with, the madness. Interest in existentialism rocketed after World War II and the Holocaust, when humankind once again proved what it is capable of.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Postscript, Kierkegaard proclaims, “where there is certainty, there is no faith.” Or again, where there is certainty, there is no risk, and “where there is no risk, there is no faith.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“For Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger, we are a witch’s brew of culture, feelings, experiences, and evaluations, and we create ourselves out of this mélange, as though our lives were an artwork.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“We pay someone to mow our backyards and spend hours searching the internet to find the best deal for our next vacation. What’s our problem?”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.”
― Gordon Daniel Marino, Basic Writings of Existentialism

“Anxiety is about the future, and, because of this, it impedes our ability to live in the moment.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Dasein is cast into existence with distinct abilities and in a nexus of culture and history.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“there is a fury beneath the apparent passivity of the depressive, a merciless and relentless rage directed at the self.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

“Going back to the pre-Socratics (and still much alive in the dialogues of Plato), there has been an ongoing debate among the lovers of wisdom as to whether wisdom is best transmitted in the form of mythos, stories and poems, or in the form of logos, explanations and reason.”
― Gordon Marino, The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age