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291,495 voters
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
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“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”
― Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
― Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
“Doubt crashes down upon us like a calamity; far from choosing it, we fall into it. And try as we will to wrest ourselves from it, to conjure it away, doubt never loses sight of us, for it is not even true that doubt crashes down upon us, doubt was within us, and we were foredoomed to it. No one chooses the lack of choice nor strives to opt for the absence of option, for nothing that affects us deeply is willed.”
― The Fall into Time
― The Fall into Time
“self-contentment is as little a standard for that to which it relates as it's absence is an argument against the value of a thing.”
― The Will to Power
― The Will to Power
“It is not a matter of going ahead (—for then one is at best a herdsmen, i.e., the herds chief requirement), but of being able to go it alone, of being able to be different.”
― The Will to Power
― The Will to Power
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror when nothing stood between you and death? Have you questioned your eyes? And by looking into them, have you then understood that you cannot die? Your pupils dilated by conquered terror are more impenetrable than the Sphinx. From their glassy immobility a certitude, strangely tonic in its brief mysterious form, is born: you cannot die. It comes from the silence of our gaze meeting itself, the Egyptian calmness of a dream facing the terror of death. Each time the fear of death grabs you, look in the mirror. You will then understand why you can never die. Your eyes know everything. For in them there are specs of nothingness, which assure you that nothing more can happen.”
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Philosophy
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What is Philosophy? Why is it important? How do you use it? This group looks at these questions and others: ethics, government, economics, skepticism, ...more
Existential Book Club
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— last activity May 03, 2026 03:51PM
This a book club for anybody interested in reading existentialist literature and fiction. Every month I'll be putting up a new text either by an exist ...more
Political Philosophy and Ethics
— 6434 members
— last activity 17 hours, 57 min ago
Study and discussion of the important questions of ethical and political philosophy from Confucius and Socrates to the present. Rules (see also the ...more
Matthew’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Matthew’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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