Kevin

“But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along. Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’. What this formula gains in brevity it loses in comprehensibility. But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms. You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition,”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

“As I went on, I got the eerie feeling of blending again with my twenty-year-old self, especially as my copies of the books were filled with that self’s weirdly emphatic juvenile marginalia.”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

“Children delight in being frightened of storms. It exercises some need within them. The guns had much the same effect on us. It was like fireworks gone mad. It made me feel I was at the centre of the universe.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Cicero concluded that “the actual hitting of the mark [is] to be chosen but not to be desired,”
― Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life