But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies.
It is always important to have something yet to do in life.
Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement – and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.
Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through.
There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.
Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
Either belief in God is unconditional or it is no belief at all.
Man’s last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation.
No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.
I try to do everything as soon as possible, and not at the last moment. This ensures that, when I am overburdened with work, I will not face the added pressure of knowing that something is still to be done.
I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.
It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
The meaning of my life is to help others find meaning in theirs.
Man’s search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.
Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.
Once an individual’s search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.
View your life from your funeral, looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn’t? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what you wouldn’t.
View life as a series of movie frames, the ending and meaning may not be apparent until the very end of the movie, and yet, each of the hundreds of individual frames has meaning within the context of the whole movie.
Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.