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Vikram

https://www.goodreads.com/notmeursault

Vikram’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (810)
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non-fiction-tbr‎ (15)
fiction-tbr‎ (10)
tbr-improved‎ (7)

literature‎ (57)
history‎ (44)
krisimos‎ (32)
psychology‎ (28)
chrisimos-philosophy‎ (27)
autodidactism‎ (16)
serious-to-read‎ (14)

german‎ (13)
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pragmatism‎ (9)
auto-maths‎ (8)
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“Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. “How was your year?” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come. Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

4 likes

“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax. . . What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

3 likes

“What am I doing here, what is the point of these smiles and gestures? My home is neither here nor elsewhere. And the world has become merely unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. Foreign - who can know what this word means?”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

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“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
― A.A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh

tags: friendship, humor, love

646 likes

“Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom.
This is Kierkegaard's message, the culmination of his whole argument about the dead-ends of character, the ideal of health, the school of anxiety, the nature of real possibility and freedom. One goes through it all to arrive at faith, the faith that one's very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one's true insignificance, weakness, death, one's existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force. Again and again throughout his writings Kierkegaard repeats the basic formula of faith: one is a creature who can do nothing, but one exists over against a living God for whom "everything is possible.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

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