Stephen

“Mahit thought, Everyone dies, except memory—”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“Where are my sensations? They have melted into . . . me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

“Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly. It is impossible to put the pieces together if you do not have in your head the idea of the whole. What is the use of providing yourself with paints if you do not know what to paint? No man sketches out a definite plan for his life; we only determine bits of it. The bowman must first know what he is aiming at: then he has to prepare hand, bow, bowstring, arrow and his drill to that end. Our projects go astray because they are not addressed to a target.16 No wind is right for a seaman who has no predetermined harbour.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“In fallenness one drifts along with the fads and trends of the crowd, caught up in the mindless busy-ness, and tranquillized by the secure feeling that everyone else is doing the same thing; things in general seem to have been worked out by us. Heidegger says that, in its fallenness, Dasein ‘becomes blind to all its possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is merely “actual”‘. In its simplest form, fallenness is the non-awareness of what it means to be.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners